Which Frameworks Do PHP Developers Prefer for Web Development?

When it comes to web development, PHP is pretty much the unanimous choice of developers. To stress its popularity, more than 80% of websites are powered by PHP. To name few of the most famous websites that were developed using PHP are Wikipedia, Yahoo, Tumblr, Friendster, Facebook, Flickr, and MailChimp.

The reason that PHP is a great solution is the ease of use and faster development. When developers face the challenge of building a high-quality website or web application in a short time, PHP frameworks come to their rescue. Empowered with organized and reusable code segments, robust security policies and a host of different policies, frameworks help in developing complex projects. In addition, developers don’t have to start from scratch each time.

Now the question is which frameworks PHP developers prefer when there are so many development frameworks available out there? According to experts, the majority of developers rely on these top five frameworks –

• Laravel
• Symfony
• Yii
• Phalcon
• Zend

So, what’s the difference among these?

Let’s take a look at these five frameworks and see why they are loved so much in PHP communities –

1. Laravel – Laravel is in the top spot. Even though it is new, it has evolved to become the most-used PHP framework. Ideally used in development of small application to large projects, its capability to build different projects rapidly, dealing with many databases, lightweight, easy to learn and with few bugs makes it a great tool for developing applications of any size.
2. Symfony – Symfony is the most consistent and clever PHP framework that’s famous for its modularity and for creating large and complex projects. Symfony’s modular blocks are called Bundles that are similar to plugins. These reusable components lay the foundation to develop PHP applications and the bundles can be used in projects outside of the Symfony framework.
3. Yii – “Yii” stands for “Yes, it is!” Another marvel in the list of PHP frameworks that helps manage repetitive tasks and speedy development. It is really fast because it uses lazy loading and the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) concept, which is well organized and logical and focuses on replacing repetitions with abstractions to avoid redundancy. This means that when you modify a single element of a system, you don’t have to make changes in other logically unrelated elements. Forums and web commnunities are some examples that are made using Yii.
4. Phalcon – A PHP framework that is delivered as a C extension and known for high performance is Phalcon. One of the main advantages of this framework is its speed and low resource consumption. As a result, Phalcon is best suited for low overhead for MVC-based applications. This framework uses Volt as a template engine, which is built in C for PHP. In addition, the powerful and secure Phalcon Query Language (PHQL) helps write queries using a standardized SQL-like language.
5. Zend – Launched in 2006, Zend is the most trusted framework in the developer community. However, Zend is mostly used for developing high-performance projects that need a lot of features, usability options and customization.

Depending upon the project requirements, PHP developers select the frameworks and embed features that serves their purpose. There are many others available, too. The selection of which to use is done based on the needs.