PHP Development Frameworks for Agile Application Development: Which Ones Are the Best?

PHP Development Frameworks for Agile Application Development: Which Ones Are the Best?

by James Patrick Winson

Regarded as the most widely used server-side scripting language, PHP is used in the development of web applications and websites. Many programmers are increasingly opting for this scripting language as more and more tools continue to be developed regularly with an aim of improving the efficiency of the programmable code. Numerous frameworks are available in the market that allow the development companies to develop and deliver complex applications and websites in considerably less amount of time. The main challenge, though, lies in choosing the one that best suits the requirements of any business.

Here we take a look at some of the top PHP frameworks trending in the market. With an extensive flexibility and highly user-friendly features, they largely help the development agencies in developing efficient and effective applications and websites for their clients.

Laravel: A web application framework featuring an elegant and expressive syntax, Laravel aims to take the pain out of the web development process for developers by giving them easy access to such common tasks caching, sessions, routing and authentication. Laravel provides developers with a powerful and accessible tool that is needed for building large and robust applications, along with added functionalities such as tightly integrated unit testing support, expressive migration system and an inversion control container. This framework is perfectly suited for projects of all shapes and sizes. Laravel is largely built on top of a number of Symfony components thus providing PHP developers a solid foundation of reliable and well-tested code to work with.

CodeIgniter: A powerful PHP framework with a small footprint, CodeIgniter has been developed exclusively for those who were in need of an elegant yet simple toolkit for building fully-featured web applications. CodeIgniter works with next to zero configuration, offers extremely simple solutions to the applications with complex requirements and does not feature coding rules. Among its special features are a rich set of libraries replete with functions for common tasks apart from logical structures and a simple interface to provide easy access to these libraries. CodeIgniter makes use of the MVC Controller approach, allowing greater separation between presentation and logic which becomes particularly useful if developers are working on a project involving the use of template files.

FuelPHP: A flexible yet simple MVC PHP 5.3+ framework, FuelPHP was designed from scratch in order to offer HMVC an integrated support with the conventional MVC architecture. With ViewModels (better known as presentation models) coming an as added bonus, developers have the option of adding a powerful layer between view and controller. It is possible to extend almost all of the classes in the core package of this framework without making any modifications to the code. Applications can also be developed in a modular fashion by dividing into modules that are easily converted into packages so that the code can be reused for the future. All web applications demand a water-tight seurity and that is exactly what the FuelPHP framework provides. Outputs are encoded, giving them high levels of security and preventing any form of unwanted XSS attacks. Functions such as QueryBuilder, input filtering and CSRF prevention are also supported so SQL injection attacks can be prevented.

CakePHP: With this framework, PHP developers can speed up their web applicatio development process by the use of certain code generation features that rapidly build framework code prototypes. It does not involve the use of any complicated configurations, all you need to do is setup your database and you are ready to start with your project. Common functions such as authentication, validation, caching, database access and translations are all integrated into this framework. The package also includes clean MVC conventions to guide in the application development procedure. This framework is capable of handling every aspect of your application, be it the initial request of the user of the final web page rendering. CakePHP also includes built-in-tools for protection and validation against form tampering and SQL Injections so that you can assure security and safety for your application.

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