PHP MVC framework for ASP.NET MVC/NHibernate developer

Question

For class, I would like a to use PHP MVC framework very similar to ASP.NET MVC with NHibernate. I am very comfortable with ASP.NET MVC. I need to use PHP and MySQL. I would not like to be concerned with the SQL to save me time. I would like to just design my PHP model classes and controllers without all of that data-access logic behind it that I would have to write.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

Also, I'm very limited on what I can install on the server. For instance, I can't upgrade PHP or run other installers. I want something I can drop in.

Answer 1

My personnal preference for "MVC Framework" would probably be Zend Framework -- though it's not the only possible choice (I'm thinking about symfony too, for instance).

About the "not writing SQL" part, I would use Doctrine, which is a great ORM Framework.
It's actually the default ORM Framework of symfony, and can be used with Zend Framework quite easily.

Answer 2

I prefer Zend Framework MVC components combined with Doctrine if really want great power. but for something simple try CaKePHP as it has its own simple ORM implementation, and the framework is built to be the php version of Ruby on Rails.

Answer 3

I suggest Symfony. It uses Doctrine (which is inspired partly by Hibernate) too, but it is integrated deeper with Symfony than Zend Framework. Symfony provides a number of helper classes which really help automate things with Doctrine (my favorite is sfDoctrinePager). Zend Framework is a good choice, but I recommend looking at Symfony first. I would avoid the other PHP MVC frameworks as they tend to be less flexible, and if you're coming from another language you may have your own preferences on how to attack a certain problem - Symfony and ZF will both give you leeway in this sense.