I have been wanting to get my hands dirty with a good PHP framework for some time, but I have never felt the need to use one for projects that I have worked on. For the last 9 months or so I have been working on quite a complex project, and decided it was time to dive right in.

It wasn’t that easy though. There are vast amounts of frameworks available for PHP, that are suitable for all kinds of projects, so which one should I choose? I started by reading the following article Ten different PHP frameworks

The best part of this article is the comparative overview of the so-called top ten frameworks. It compares each framework and its features. This proved to be very useful. I’m of the opinion that there isn’t “one framework to rule them all” but there is a framework to suit a particular project. With this in mind it is best to make a note of what your projects goals are and what is to be achieved. For my project I required easy access to ajax libraries directly within the framework, a reasonably good authentication module, wanted a framework that followed the MVC design pattern, had both a database abstraction layer and an object record mapper, that follows the Active Record pattern. I initially thought this was a tough call, but I was pleasantly surprised by these feature rich frameworks.

I eventually opted for Symfony, as it gave me all the features I required, and then some. Its pluggable architecture means it easily extendible, and as a massive community following. Try their website over at www.symfony-project.com

In my next post,  I will give a quick and easy how-to, on “how-to” get a simple application running using symfony.