PHP Framework “Battle”

Zakir Hemraj

• Slides and code will be posted on the meetup group

• Video will be posted on: achievers.com/tech

• Tell your friends!

About Me

• Dev Team Lead @ Achievers

• Professional Web Framework Experience:– J2EE with Spring, Hibernate– PHP with CodeIgniter– Ruby on Rails

• Not an expert in Zend Framework, CakePHP or Symfony

Goal

1. Give you “flavor” of a few frameworks

2. Share some scientific and subjective comparisons

3. Make you better equipped to compare and choose the right framework

What I’m not doing…

• In-depth framework code walkthrough of all features and functions

• Handing you a silver bullet

Agenda

1. Overview of frameworks 2. Review basic concepts– MVC, ORMs

3. The application – requirements, db schema

4. Code walkthrough5. Performance and other comparisons6. Final thoughts

The Contenders

Big Sites

CakePHP Zend Framework Symfony CodeIgniter

askmen.com legaldownload.net cfl.ca dictionary.com

usafootball.com onewishlist.net flash-wars.com codeguru.com

gamestous.com manageme.in ted.com expressionengine.com

Sources:http://book.cakephp.org/1.2/view/510/Sites-in-the-wildhttp://framework.zend.com/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=14134http://trac.symfony-project.org/wiki/ApplicationsDevelopedWithSymfony

“You can write shitty code in any language, any framework”

Review - MVC

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93controller

• Most web frameworks are MVC these days

• Lots of inconsistencies with the “model” layer

HTTP Request

HTML

Business Logic & DB Access

Review - ORM

• Object Relational Mapping

• Maps database records to objects

• 1-to-1 table to object class– E.g. job table -> job class

• Layer of abstraction to:– Make code more maintainable– Enable stronger OO programming

class TechTalk{ }

table:tech_talk

ORM

Now What?

The Application

• A basic job board where people can:– Add jobs– View a listing of jobs– Look at a post in more detail

• So simple, you could probably code it in your sleep

The Schema

Setup1. Download

framework *

2. Configure your app with your db

3. Point your web server to the directory (i.e. vhost in apache)

4. Start coding

Zend Code Summary

• Nice command line tools -> less typing

• Hard object instantiations play nice with IDE

• Good, OO separation of layers, including db access, business logic, and forms

• Cons: We’ll discuss later ;)

CI Code Summary

• Super lightweight

• Very few conventions or “magic”– Doesn’t force things on you– Very explicit

• Lots of well documented tools and libraries

CAKE Summary

• Rails-like convention over configuration

• Very powerful, with convenient tools like scaffolding and strong relational mapping

• Lots of “magic” that you need to be aware of

CON

FIGU

RATI

ON

CONVENTION

CI CAKEZend

Documentation

• Zend: – Complete, but fragmented – hard to follow.

• CI – Great

• CAKE– Outstanding

Other ComparisonsZend CI CAKE

i18n Y Y Y

unit testing Y N * Y

templating Y Y * Y

security utils Y Y Y

authentication Y N Y

caching Y Y Y

Performance

• Source: http://www.ruilog.com/blog/view/b6f0e42cf705.html

• Simple MVC logic, no DB connection

• See site for full hardware specs

Requests per Second

CodeIgniter 2.1 CakePHP 2.0.4 Zend 1.11.11 Symfony 2.0.60

500

1000

1500

2000

25002331

873

678

1367

Memory Usage (KB)

CodeIgniter 2.1 CakePHP 2.0.4 Zend 1.11.11 Symfony 2.0.60

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

752.55

2824.26

2576.47

1711.57

System Load Average in 1 Minute

CodeIgniter 2.1 CakePHP 2.0.4 Zend 1.11.11 Symfony 2.0.60

2

4

6

8

10

12

1.65

5.1

10.02

1.44

Avg. Response Time (Milliseconds)

CodeIgniter 2.1 CakePHP 2.0.4 Zend 1.11.11 Symfony 2.0.60

5

10

15

20

25

7.24

14.73

20.22

12.79

Number of Function Calls

CodeIgniter 2.1 CakePHP 2.0.4 Zend 1.11.11 Symfony 2.0.60

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

1400

1600

1800

2000

491

834

1789

792

Number of Included Files

CodeIgniter 2.1 CakePHP 2.0.4 Zend 1.11.11 Symfony 2.0.60

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

AND LASTLY…

My Two Cents

• Too much abstraction is bad

• Understand the tradeoffs

• You will need to break out of the framework

• Stay curious

<?echo “END”;die();

?>