Which PHP frameworks are used by corporations?

Question

There are several questions about PHP frameworks, but I'm curious as to which one(s) are used in the commercial world when developing web applications with PHP. At my first web-based job, they didn't have a framework for the PHP codebase. Is this common when dealing with PHP? If not, what frameworks to companies producing a product (either a site that provides a service of some kind or a web-based product that can be purchased) using PHP tend to use?

Answer 1

In last two places I've worked company had their own (private, built in-house) framework.

Answer 2

Is this common when dealing with PHP?

In my experience, unfortunately it is. This is of course a gross generalization, but people who tend to learn PHP as their first programming language don't learn the essentials of maintainable software development and often don't really know how to write good code. I think this is a failing of the PHP community, where historically most learning resources don't emphasize good practices (probably because the authors didn't know any better!). You can of course write good code with PHP, as long as you understand underlying programming principles.

Companies will often start out with a hap-hazzard code base of PHP scripts that get re-used and gradually extended from project to project (often without source control!). The companies that know what they're doing and take it seriously will evolve this into some kind of in-house framework, or I have often found they'll move onto something without the historical crapness of PHP, like Django or Ruby on Rails.

If you're just starting out, there are several decent MVC frameworks that will form a good base for all your developers to learn and use. In no particular order:

• CakePHP
• CodeIgniter
• Zend Framework

There are of course others as well.

That said, as always it depends on the project. Sometimes a framework either won't make sense or will be overkill, othertimes you're better off using a pre-built product (like a CMS) and building extensions to it.

Answer 3

Most frameworks are strongly focused on the presentation layer. Now, "corporate" is of course a rather vague term, but I assume you mean for more typical it-tasks, such as accounting, crm etc. For these tasks, the presentation layer is a much smaller part of the entire application. Not only does this make said frameworks less important - it actually disqualifies them somewhat, since you don't want the restrictions on your model layer, that they impose.

Answer 4

I think it gets more and more common to use a framework. A few years back most programmers developed their own framework. But the cost to train a new employee for such a framework gets higher and higher. Therefore many companies are moving now to well known frameworks.

I guess that Zend is currently the most used Framework in the corporate environment. One reason is that it does not give you any restrictions on the model layer.

I can not predict the future but I guess that Flow3 will be used in the future too. It is the new Framework behind Typo3. And many Typo3 developers (web designers) who need to write web applications will probably use Flow3 then.

Answer 5

I'm not sure if PHP has gone into the enterprise market in the US yet but when i worked in a corporate office the language what they use is Microsoft .NET. PHP is yet to enter the corporate world IMO. It is popular with the hacker world and maybe micro and small software/web companies.

Answer 6

hi,

recently i talked with a CTO of a company, offering a e-lecture solution and we talked about PHP for a while ... we both agreed, it is not the best language for rock solid solutions, but he pointed out the symfony framework, they used just before moving to java ...

also, flow3 mentioned by raffael is quite powerful ... most interesting thing to me is, it brings AOP into PHP ...

Answer 7

The only enterprise-level framework I can think is Zend Framework. CakePHP, Code Igniter and others are only focused on RAD development.

Answer 8

You may want to look at www.flow3.org, it's a pretty comprehensive approach to PHP application frameworking and is rapidly approaching its first mainstream Beta release.

Answer 9

Having experience with CI , yiiframework and calephp (not much, really) my opinion is that CI is not flexible as ohter 2, so I do not recommend it on larger-scale projects. Anyone who disagree, just can try a demo project with cakephp and Yii and he will see how things are easier with them as crud,form validation etc. Of course all have their disadvantages :)