| I have been thinking about writing a web MVC based application in PHP (though i dont have prior php programming experience) Initially i settled with Zend framework, and was satisfied with the tutorials available; the rich feature set it presented; but lately googled and found that the number of requests that it can handle is very meagre. Since I did not hear about any enterprise applications built in the Zend framework I decided to switch to DooPhp. After researching a bit abt the various available frameworks (Zend Framework, Code Igniter, Yii, DooPhp, Prado, Kohana, SolarPHP .... ) I found that there isnt much genuine comparisons done! We are building an application which will connect to a database(Postgres) and would do basic CRUD operations, require features for sending html mails, pdf creation and reporting tools(to represent data graphically). We dont expect very heavy loads; but in case we would definitely want to scale. Which is the best php framework I should choose? |
You'll see different responses from all different kinds of people to this. Everybody has a different allocation to the relative weights of different aspects of the system.
However, I would advise you to not worry much about application performance. Focus on programmer performance instead; search through Coding Horror's blog for more info on that.
Your difficulty will be reaching the point (in terms of users/loads) where you need to scale. I mean, how many users would you need before you ran too high of a load on some of the beefy Amazon EC2 instances? For almost everyone, their app will never reach that scale.
Also, scaling the application layer is little more than moving sessions to a database and putting a load balancer in front of your webservers. DB stuff is a lot harder, but for basic CRUD stuff you're going to be fine for a long while.
As far as performance goes, Paul Jones has a blog post (or two) on the performance of some different frameworks. I think Zend / CodeIgnitor were the two fastest, followed by symfony. CakePHP was at the end of the list, although the speed difference between top and bottom frameworks was just a factor of 2 or so. And Cake has seen about a 33% speed up in their codebase since then.
In short, don't worry about scaling. Pick the framework that looks like it will make your coders more productive.