When & Why to Use PHP Framework?

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Popular PHP Frameworks
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Over the last few years web development industry has seen ground breaking changes in frameworks. As the time has gone popular PHP frameworks like Laravel, Phalcon, Symfony, Zend and CodeIgniter have just got more bigger and better and become handy tool for developers to build giant application effortlessly.

PHP is one of the widely used languages for web development and almost every reputed CMS system use PHP as a base programming language. Some really popular CMS like WordPress and Joomla are written in PHP and one of the widely accepted and giant eCommerce system called Magento has been built with the use of Zend framework. We shouldn’t exaggerate on the fact that PHP is one the best language available for web programming which has made it possible to build from simple one liner to powerful content management and community web applications extremely easy. The huge feature list, easy learning and fundamentally sound architecture has further produced few outstanding arrays of frameworks making the process for web applications development further simpler.

With so many off the shelf CMS and eCommerce platforms available, does it still make sense to go for custom development using any of the PHP based frameworks like Code Igniter or Zend Framework or Symphony? We intend to bring you insight into why and when you can take a decision to use PHP Framework for both developers and business perspective.

Size of a Project

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For a simple web application or a website with basic features it’s wiser to use some good open source system. However for more complex and bespoke functionality requirement it’s more recommended to work with framework.

A completely customized structure, functionality developed keeping in mind your business and users, can be much handier rather than enhancing off the shelf systems which can many times be unnecessarily huge, confusing and difficult to manage. The key to a successful bespoke system built on any PHP framework is, to well plan the architecture and approach following the best development practice resulting in something more unique to business requirements.

Tight deadlines

urgent

Huge amount of development time can be saved with the use of Frameworks due to availability of large variety of tools like input sanitization and abstraction layers in particular.

It’s very common scenario in website development companies where clients are really pressurizing and so often demand quick turnaround. Frameworks can be real life savers under high pressure as they help enormously in quickly delivering repetitive and commons tasks.

For web developers apart from time constraint respite it’s also advisable to explore the knowledge of frameworks as they can be so much helpful in improving programming skills.

For Beginners To backend PHP Programming Task

When you are new to web development field and if you are looking to learn the basic of server side language then we would advise to first attempt to write your own code before you make use of frameworks. Once you gain some good experience in using server side language, you will be getting much better grasp of using framework. It is always good to understand the language of the framework on which it is built first. This will help you utilize the framework and efficient do debugging and further enhancements easily.

There are pretty good reasons to use the Frameworks:

  • Code and file organization is extremely easy
  • Countless numbers of tools and libraries that can help you with:
    • Form validation
    • Database abstraction
    • Input/Output filtering
    • Session and Cookie handling
    • Email, Calender and pagination and much more
  • MVC (Model View Controller) Architecture
  • Less code which ultimately speeds up your development
  • Security – PHP has many input and output filtering functions which can add extra security layer to protect your website against certain attacks
  • Suitable for teamwork
  • PHP frameworks have great active community support. You will find the accurate solution of any query quickly

List of Popular PHP Frameworks:

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There are many other pros and cons of using frameworks but its utilization is completely dependent on your project requirement and choice of development platform for web developers. Please share with us your experience and which framework you are using to get your job done.

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