Does anyone know of a good framework or application to rapidly build front-ends for MySQL and PHP based web applications?

Question

Can anyone recommend a good, visually attractive PHP framework or application to rapidly create back office / admin interfaces to MySQL based applications.

I generally have to build bespoke back office UIs for every PHP web based application I write and wondered if there is an easier way of quickly building a web front-end to MySQL data.

Update Just to be clear I'm not looking for a framework to write code per say or an IDE, I'm looking for something to rapidly build rich graphical web interfaces.

Answer 1

I'm not sure if you are talking about an IDE (programming application), or a PHP framework.

If you are talking about IDEs, Zend (http://zend.com) or Eclipse (//http://www.eclipse.org/) are the two major IDEs out there. Zend has its own framework and Eclipse allows you to use whatever framework you choose. There is also, Aptana (http://aptana.org) and Adobe's Dreamweaver.

As for PHP frameworks, Zend has its own, but there are also CodeIgniter (http://www.codeigniter.com) and CakePHP (http://www.cakephp.org). I prefer codeigniter because its more efficient and its documentation is amazing. Although CakePHP has its benefits as well, especially for rapid database development.

Answer 2

I think codeigniter is a good choice. Cakephp has very ambiguous documentation...

Answer 3

Embarcadero's Delphi For PHP is quite good. It uses the VCL For PHP framework, and provides an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface for creating the web applications.

Answer 4

I'm looking for something to rapidly build rich graphical web interfaces.

The thing is, in order to have a rich UI in the browser, you either need third party plugins like Flash or Silverlight or use the traditional combination of HTML, CSS and a whole lot of JavaScript, because that is how the behavior and Ajax capabilities get into the UI components of a RIA. A serverside framework capable of creating a rich UI would have to know how to create all this. Frameworks like this do exist (GWT comes to mind), but there is no dedicated framework for this in the PHP world (at least not to my knowledge).

The notable PHP frameworks all offer rapid application development out of the box. Some of them, like Cake, Symfony and ZF (don't know about CI) even offer make-like tools to create controllers, models and view scripts through code generation, speeding up development time even more. Feature-wise, there is very little you will miss in any of them. However, none of them give you rich UIs like that of ExtJS, Dojo or jQueryUI (to name some JS framewoks) out of the box.

The three closest things to what you are looking for would be to

• use the available PHP wrappers for Ext.direct or
• Zend Framework's Dojo components or
• Zend Framework with Flex/AMF.

In addition, there is frameworks like PRADO which use their own templating language to create rich components or framework that use XUL to use the browser's native UI components. I'd categorize them as, well.. not so common.