Building PHP Applications with Symfony™, CakePHP, and Zend® Framework

Chapter 18. Summary

The more you know, the more you realize you know nothing.

—Socrates

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Pros and cons of the three frameworks.

• Table of features.

• Final comparison.

First of all, we want to say thank you for reading such a thick book and staying with us for so long! We hope you found it helpful and informative.

This is the part many of you have been waiting for: the final comparison of the three frameworks. It goes far beyond listing their unique features; we will mercilessly point out all their advantages and disadvantages here.

FEATURES

We want to start with the big picture: this section presents lists of features for each framework, both good and bad. We've listed only unique traits; if all frameworks perform similarly in an area, that area is not included here. These lists are far from complete and exhaustive, and of course they are affected by our personal experiences, including those we gained while writing this book.

Symfony

Symfony is a great tool for real professionals. It is full-featured and strictly follows all good coding practices.

Advantages

Here is our list of Symfony's advantages:

• Doctrine object-relational mapping (ORM)–integrated; easy to switch to Propel in a few steps (Chapter 3).

• Model classes can be generated based on schema or on database tables using command-line interface (CLI) tools. This accelerates the development process (Chapter 4).

• A lot of plug-ins are available in one place, most of which are well documented, divided into categories. ...