Most Trending PHP Frameworks in 2016
Development of software applications is always a complex and a time consuming process. But thanks to those high-end PHP frameworks in 2016, that developing an agile application has now become easier and faster.
That much needed app maintenance and scalability is now possible with the set of these highly functional PHP frameworks in 2016, which compiles well with all the development standards and keeps your code organized, in a way, helping your application to evolve and grow over the time.
Why Use A PHP Framework:
1.Make speed development possible
2.Provide well-organized, reusable and maintainable code
3.Let you grow over time as web apps running on frameworks are scalable
4.Spare you from the worries about low-level security of a site
5.Follow the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern that ensures the separation of presentation and logic
6.Promote modern web development practices such as object-oriented programming tool
1 – Laravel:
Laravel is one of the top trending open source development frameworks for PHP technologies. This is specifically designed for web application development based on MVC structure. Laravel is one of the most popular clean & classy PHP frameworks in 2016. Laravel development facilitates creating best applications by making use of simple and expressive syntax. This allows a creation of web applications with optimum ease.
Laravel has many features that make rapid application development possible. This has its own light-weight templating engine called “Blade”, elegant syntax that facilitates tasks you frequently need to do, such as authentication, sessions, queueing, caching and RESTful routing. Laravel also includes a local development environment called Homestead that is a packaged Vagrant box.
Finally, we’ve come to our winner — a framework with the most beautiful name — Laravel! And we are not alone: Despite being a comparatively new PHP frameworks in 2016 (it was launched in 2011), Laravel has a remarkably huge ecosystem. It has almost perfect documentation and even more — Laracasts screencast tutorials cover all the missing docs and use cases.
Laravel Framework Benefits:
- Bundles provide Laravel with a modular packaging system
- Class auto loading provides automated loading of PHP classes, without the need for manual maintenance of inclusion paths.
- Easily multilingual
- Unit testing is one of the most important aspects at Laravel, which itself has a large number of tests for detecting and preventing regressions.
2 – Yii Framework:
Yii is a high performance feature rich framework that mainly lets you focus on the beautifulness of the code while doing the entire grunge work completely behind the scenes. A lot of things in Yii happen automatically but still the learning curve is slightly steeper.
An Open Source PHP framework built on OOP concepts, Yii does the job for you regardless of whether you want a simple or a multiple-functional website. Yii lets you model database objects as objects and also has built-in authentication support with Ajax-enabled widgets. Add automatic code generation and documentation to it and you get a complete package!
It is highly popular framework today for big scale web development using PHP. Other features are:
- It performs faster than other frameworks, as it uses lazy loading technique
- It supports OOP (Object Oriented Programming)
- Follows DRY coding principles so you can get clean and logical code
- Integrated with jQuery and Ajax features
- It has easy to use skinning and theming mechanism
- Giias a powerful class code generator to provide web interface to generate code interactively and give rapid prototyping facilities
Yii Framework Benefits:
- Security at its best with Yii. From input validation and output filtering to SQL injection attacks and cross-site scripting (XSS) prevention, it offers everything to ensure your application is safe and secure.
- Provides excellent support for writing and running both unit tests and functionality tests, which are prominently based on PHP Unit and Selenium.
- Has a built in authentication support that is facilitated via RBAC (Role Based Access Control).
- Well integrated with JQuery and comes bundled with major Ajax enabled widgets like auto completion input field, Treeview, Data Grid etc that lets you write highly efficient and versatile UI.
3 – CakePHP Framework:
Considered as a contemporary framework for PHP development, CakePHP 3.0 comes loaded with remarkable features including enhanced components and helpers, improved session management, improved consistency of conventions, ORM improvements and many more. CakePHP 3.0 comes with increased modularity, allowing you to create more standalone libraries in addition to reducing coupling. Plus, there are tools like PSR-0, PSR-1 and composer which have helped in improving the interoperability.
Despite being a ten-years-old framework, CakePHP yet remains one of the most popular. It is easy to learn with quick and adjustable templating. The built-in CRUD feature is very helpful for database interaction. In its latest version, CakePHP 3.x has improved session management and modularity (by decoupling several components) as well as widened the ability of creating more standalone libraries.
It is a decade old framework though it has kept its popularity intact among the PHP developers who are comfortable with strict conventions against configuration. Some noteworthy features are:
- Built-in CRUD featuresfor smooth database interactions
- Improved session management
- Modularity by decoupling several components
- Capable of creating more standalone libraries
- SQL injection prevention
- Input validation
- XSS prevention
- CSRF protection
CakePHP 3.0 Framework Benefit:
- Good code generation and scaffolding features that rapidly build prototypes to suit all your needs
- No complicated XML/YAML file configurations to set up databases Perfectly suited for commercial applications Immense Built functionalities like Translation access, database access, caching, validation and authentication
- Securing your App from antisocial elements through CSRF protection, form tampering protection, SQL injection prevention, XSS prevention.
4 – PHPixie framework:
PHPixie is a comparatively new solution, which was introduced in 2012 to build a high-performance framework for read-only websites. PHPixie also implements the HMVC design pattern like FuelPHP. It is made of independent components that can be used without the framework itself. The PHPixie components are 100% unit tested and require minimum dependencies.
Fun fact about PHPixie — according to the 2015’s Sitepoint survey, it is the favorite PHP frameworks in 2016 of Ukrainian developers. Kultprosvet’s team is also located in Ukraine, but we can’t call PHPixie our number one, ha-ha. Read further to see who’s our beloved. The same study shows it is most popular of the underaged group. We bet, the reason for that is the cute fairy picture on their website.
It is a high-performance PHP framework to create read-only websites. Just like FuelPHP, it is implementing HMVC (Hierarchical MVC) design pattern. It has some highlighted features such as:
- Its components are 1% unit tested and requiring minimal dependencies
- This has big community and documentation to learn framework quickly and conveniently
- It has standard (Object Relational Mapping) ORM
- Caching
- Input validation
- Authentication and authorization
- Support for HAML markup
- Enables schema migration
- Sophisticated routing system
5 – CodeIgniter:
CodeIgniter is a ten-year-old lightweight PHP frameworks in 2016 with a very straightforward installation process that requires only a minimal configuration, so you won’t face any hassle. We can call it a nice choice if you’d like to avoid PHP versions conflict, as it works perfectly on nearly all shared and dedicated hosting platforms.
CodeIgniter is not completely based on the MVC development pattern. Using Controller classes is a must, but Models and Views are optional, and you can use your own coding and naming conventions. Yes, CodeIgniter gives exceptional freedom to programmers. It’s a lean 2 MB framework, however, you can add third-party plugins if you need more complex functionalities.
Want to build your PHP website in the shortest time? Well, CodeIgniter is what you need then. It makes you do your work faster by providing libraries for all your common tasks thereby minimizing code. This tops with a simple logical structure as well. It doesn’t need a template language and with almost zero configuration, your website can go live in a whiff!
Just like CakePHP, it is also ten years old PHP framework and has enough user base due to its some attractive features and functionality including:
- It is a lightweight PHP framework highly suitable for small to medium projects
- this is excellent choice for beginners to intermediate PHP developers
- It required minimal configuration with straightforward installation process
- It considers as the nice choice when PHP developers want to avoid PHP version conflicts
- Although it is following somewhat MVC pattern, it needs to use Controller class compulsorily whereas Models and Views are optional
- It lets you useyour (own) naming and coding conventions
- It allows third-party plugins for extended features or functionality
6 – Zend Framework:
Zend Framework is an open source framework for developing web applications and services using PHP 5.3+. It uses 100% object-oriented code and most of the new features of PHP 5.3, namely namespaces, late static binding, lambda functions and closures. Zend PHP framework is a robust and stable solution stuffed with a lot of configuration options. It is normally not recommended for smaller projects but excellent for more complex ones.
Zend Framework has numerous great features: cryptographic coding tools, easy-to-use drag and drop editor with support for front-end technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript), instant online debugging and PHP Unit testing tools, and a connected Database Wizard. it was designed with the Agile methodology in mind, which helps to produce high-quality apps for corporate clients.
Zend is a robust PHP framework with tons of configuration options. Therefore, it is the best fit for large scale web development with enough complexities. It is the reason that newbies and some intermediate PHP developers keep distance with this framework.
Zend was created by keeping Agile Methodology in mind to produce high quality and big apps for corporate clients. It has many distinguish features such as:
- Cryptographic coding tools
- Easy-to-use drag and drop editor
- Support for front-end technologies likes HTML, CSS, JavaScript
- Instant online debugging
- PHP unit testing tools
- Connected database wizard
7 – Phalcon PHP framework:
The Phalcon was introduced in 2012 and became popular among PHP developers very quickly. Phalcon is said to be as fast as a falcon because it is written in C and C++ to reach the highest level of performance optimization possible. No worries, you don’t have to learn the C language, as the functionality is exposed as PHP classes that are ready to use for any purpose.
As Phalcon is delivered as a C-extension, its architecture is optimized at low levels which notably diminishes the overhead, which is typical of MVC-based apps. Phalcon not only promotes execution speeds but also reduces resource usage. This PHP framework is packed with many excellent features: universal auto-loader, asset management, security, translation, caching, etc. As it’s a well-documented and easy-to-use framework, you might want to check it out.
Interesting fact about Phalcon: in 2014 it was the second best PHP framework for web applications according to sitepoint.com.
As its name suggests, it is fast in performance, so it has gained popularity despite being young PHP framework. It is fast because it has written in C and C++ and the highest level of performance optimization is possible with it.
Phalcon diminishes the overhead considerably by being a C-extension and offering the architecture optimized at low-level. It promotes execution speed as well as cut the resources consumption.
It has standard features such as:
- Universal auto-loader
- Asset management
- Security
- Translation
- Caching
8 – Fuel PHP framework:
Being an adjustable full-stack PHP framework, FuelPHP supports not only the regular MVC pattern but also its new version, HMVC (Hierarchical MVC) on the architecture level. It has an optional class called Presenter (previously called ViewModel) between the Controller and View layers that holds the logic needed to generate Views.
FuelPHP is modular and extendable, it takes care of security with the help of such features as input and URI filtering and output encoding. FuelPHP comes with its own authentication framework, as well as many other advanced characteristics and a comprehensive documentation.
A simple, flexible PHP framework with a router-based approach, FuelPHP boasts of many great features such as RESTful implementation, template parsing, vulnerability protections and a caching system. If you are a beginner and look to build a PHP website, FuelPHP should be one framework you must consider.
9 – Slim PHP framework:
Slim is also among the top PHP frameworks as a micro-framework that equips you with everything you might need for a small project or app, where a full-stack framework would be considered “too much”.
It has such features as client-side HTTP caching, URL routing, session and cookie encryption, and it supports flash messages across HTTP requests as well. Its user guide is nice and easy to read.
Slim is a PHP micro framework that helps you quickly write simple yet powerful web applications and APIs.
It is a micro-framework in a sense, so it is most suitable for small to medium PHP web development projects when developers want to avoid a full-stack framework.
It has some good features including:
- Client-side HTTP caching
- URL routing
- Session and cookie encryption
- Supports flash messages across HTTP requests
- Nice user guide
10 – Symfony 2 PHP framework:
The components of the Symfony 2 framework are used by many awesome projects such as the Drupal 8 CMS, or the phpBB forum software, and Laravel — our (spoiler alert!) favorite framework — also relies on it. Symfony has an extensive developer community and a lot of passionate supporters.
You can install any of the Components with the Composer PHP dependency manager. The Symfony’s website has the Showcase section where you can take a glance at the projects accomplished with the help of this convenient framework.
Do you know that Drupal CMS, phpBB forum, and Laravel framework are using the components of Symfony framework! It is because Symfony Components are reusable PHP libraries to accomplish various tasks including:
- Form creation
- Object creation and configuration
- Authentication
- Routing
- Templating
It has Composer PHP dependency manager to install and manage components.