MVC model (and ORM) frameworks in PHP
February 9th, 2006
I have been researching several MVC frameworks (in particular the Model components of these packages) as well as some separate ORM libraries for PHP. I have been getting more and more into Ruby on Rails ActiveRecord use, and have been interested to see how PHP libraries compare.
So far I have looked at Propel, Biscuit, TaniPHP, WASP, Symphony, Cake, Solar, PHP on Trax, Prado and a few more to boot. The truth is, I just cannot find one that ticks all of the boxes for me.
Many suffer from too little documentation, several seem to be too complicated for their own good, and to be blunt there are just too many separate products trying to be the same thing. Of them all, Biscuit caught my eye but I cannot remember why … perhaps because I like the name and I wanted a cup of tea by that point.
I think the problem for me is that most of the frameworks try to follow Rails too closely, and end up suffering as a result. Now - I may well eat those words after some more research - so don’t blow any fuses yet. I will keep the feedback coming as I find out more over the next couple of weeks.
Entry Filed under: General, Software development, PHP
5 Comments Add your own
1. Brian Fioca | February 23rd, 2006 at 3:05 am
Good post. I agree that following Rails is generally not very productive, since it doesn’t do any good to try to copy a thing that works fine the way it is for what it does. We at the WASP team are working on a balance between the ideas introduced with Rails and some other useful things that it doesn’t have. It’s true that this is still an early stage for PHP frameworks, but I believe that, with time, this will turn into a more mature arena and spawn some rather notable applications.
2. Happy ORM'ing | June 30th, 2006 at 1:00 am
On your list you didn’t meantion Doctrine (www.phpdoctrine.com), which is imo the most complete ORM solution availible for PHP.
3. Alexander | June 30th, 2006 at 10:49 pm
I have just had a look at Doctrine and I must say it looks very promising. I am looking forward to putting it through its paces sometime soon. Thanks for pointing it out!
4. Sigurd Magnusson | November 4th, 2007 at 10:19 am
Have you looked into SilverStripe, a PHP 5.2 project?
(Don’t you get worried when someone purports to have written a framework in PHP4 when it clearly lacks major object oriented language features and therefore anything out of it really struggles to be compared to Django or Rails?)
Anyway, underneath SilverStripe is is the sapphire framework. It is fully featured by itself, however we’re doing something quite different by additionally writing a fully fledged CMS that interplays beautifully with it (the CMS is focused on being both the web 2.0 expectation of “intuitive” and yet manages sites far bigger than blogs).
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