Quick Summary Blog:
Do you also believe that PHP is dead? If yes, then you are mistaken as big giants like Facebook and Wikipedia are already using PHP and working smoothly. But what best PHP frameworks they are using for their process? Let’s explore the top PHP frameworks that you should use in web app development.
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We have a TEAM to get you there.Looking for the best PHP frameworks but not sure what type of framework best fits your web app development needs?
No worries, after a detailed market survey and industry analysis, we have concluded some of the best PHP web frameworks that can make your app run like a well-oiled machine.
But before that many of you are curious to know that why there is a surging demand for web app development. Why businesses are in need to hire the best PHP developers in India…
Let’s get into it!
Is PHP Still Alive For Web App Development?
With the latest release of 8.1.21 version on 6th July 2023, it is completely fair to trust that PHP is alive!
In today’s digital age, web applications have become indispensable tools for businesses and individuals alike. These dynamic platforms offer unparalleled accessibility, enabling users to access services and information from anywhere with an internet connection.
Whether it’s e-commerce, social networking, project management, or even online banking, web apps have revolutionized how we interact with technology.
As the demand for more sophisticated and responsive web applications continues to rise, choosing the right development framework becomes crucial.
PHP, a server-side scripting language, has emerged as a top contender for web app development due to its flexibility, scalability, and robust community support.
Image Source: ideamotive.co
Before you get straight to hiring PHP developers in India, let’s understand why PHP is the top choice of developers…
What Is a PHP Framework?
A PHP framework is a pre-designed, structured platform that provides developers with a set of tools, libraries, and features to streamline the process of building web applications. It offers a foundation and standardizes coding practices, enhancing efficiency and maintainability while promoting code reusability.
PHP frameworks simplify complex tasks, such as database interaction, routing, and authentication, allowing developers to focus on building unique and innovative web applications.
Why use PHP Frameworks?
With a plethora of options available in the market, what makes PHP Frameworks a worthy choice for web app development? What features of PHP make it widely adopted in web development? Before getting into the compelling reasons, let’s take a look at the market position of PHP.
Important Stats and Facts About PHP
- PHP always thrives on improvement and bought the latest update for the websites and Version 7 is used by 64.4% of all the websites that use PHP.
Image Source: w3techs.com
- According to the survey report of W3Tech, 77.4% of all the websites using the server-side programming language are using PHP.
Image Source: w3techs.com
- There are around 700,000 searches on Google every month just for the term PHP.
Image Source: techjury.net
Read more to know whether PHP Vs JavaScript- Which is the best choice of framework for your big project?
Now let’s jump on the compelling reasons why should hire web developers in India to use PHP for your next business project.
Top Reasons To Use PHP Web Frameworks
Using PHP frameworks offers numerous advantages that streamline the web development process and improve the overall quality of web applications:
1. Rapid Development
PHP frameworks come equipped with pre-built libraries, modules, and tools that simplify repetitive tasks, allowing developers to build applications faster. They provide a foundation and structure to work upon, reducing the need for writing boilerplate code and accelerating the development process.
For Instance, the CakePHP framework incorporates the powerful Bake command-line tool, which swiftly generates the necessary skeleton code for your application, saving you valuable development time.
Therefore, by using the best PHP frameworks, you can streamline the web development process and deliver a more robust and reliable solution.
2. Code Reusability
PHP frameworks promote code reusability therefore, there is no need of writing the codes from scratch. Developers can create libraries or packages that can be easily integrated into multiple projects, saving time and effort in writing the same code repeatedly.
3. Security
Most PHP frameworks come with built-in security features and practices, protecting web applications from common vulnerabilities like SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and cross-site request forgery (CSRF). These security measures ensure that applications are more resilient against potential attacks.
Read more to know “Pro Tips To Improve Your Android App Security”.
4. Scalability
PHP frameworks facilitate the creation of scalable web applications that can handle increased traffic and growing user bases. They provide optimized database handling and efficient resource management, ensuring that the application can accommodate expansion without sacrificing performance.
5. Community Support
Major PHP frameworks have active and dedicated communities of developers, offering extensive documentation, forums, and tutorials. This support network can be valuable for troubleshooting, learning, and staying up-to-date with best practices and emerging trends in web development.
6. MVC Architecture
Most PHP frameworks follow the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern, which separates the application’s logic, presentation, and data layers. This separation enhances code organization, making it easier to maintain, modify, and collaborate on projects.
7. Testing and Debugging
PHP frameworks often include testing and debugging tools that assist developers in identifying and resolving issues during the development process. This ensures a higher level of code quality and minimizes the chances of bugs in the final application.
8. Compatibility and Interoperability
PHP frameworks are designed to be compatible with various databases, platforms, and web servers. This allows developers to deploy applications across different environments, reaching a broader audience and catering to diverse user preferences.
These are the few qualities of PHP that convenience you to kickstart your project. You can read more to know the benefits of hiring software developers in India.
But if you are not sure how would you select the best PHP frameworks for your project, then here we have listed a few tips that you need to know.
What You Should Look For While Choosing the Best PHP Frameworks?
When selecting the best PHP framework for your web development project, several key factors should be considered to ensure the right fit for your specific needs. Here are essential aspects to look for:
- Project Requirements: Assess your project’s scope and requirements. Different PHP frameworks are designed for specific purposes, such as building small web applications, enterprise-level systems, or RESTful APIs. Choose the best PHP web frameworks that aligns with your project’s size, complexity, and goals.
- Documentation and Community Support: Check the availability and quality of documentation, tutorials, and community support for the framework. Top PHP frameworks are always have an active and helpful community ensures that you can find answers to your questions, troubleshoot issues, and stay updated with best practices.
- Performance and Speed: Evaluate the framework’s performance benchmarks and speed. Look for the top PHP frameworks that have optimized code execution and minimal overhead to ensure your application can handle high traffic and deliver a smooth user experience.
- Security Features: Security is crucial for any web application. Ensure the framework provides built-in security features, such as protection against SQL injection, XSS, CSRF, and other common vulnerabilities. The best PHP Frameworks always ensure a strong security foundation that will safeguard your application and users’ data.
- Database Support: Consider the compatibility and ease of integration with your preferred database system. The top PHP frameworks always support various databases, allowing you to work with the one that best suits your application’s needs.
- MVC Architecture: Look for the best PHP frameworks that follow the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern. MVC promotes a clear separation of concerns, making your codebase more organized, maintainable, and scalable.
- Flexibility and Extensibility: Ensure the framework allows for easy customization and extension. It should provide a modular structure that enables you to add or remove components based on your project requirements.
- Community and Longevity: Consider the framework’s popularity and how long it has been actively maintained. A strong user base and continuous updates indicate the framework’s stability and potential for long-term support.
- Learning Curve: Evaluate the learning curve associated with the framework. Choose one that aligns with your team’s expertise and skills, or be prepared to invest time in learning new technologies if necessary.
- Tooling and Development Utilities: Check if the framework includes useful development tools like CLI utilities, testing libraries, and debugging support. These tools can significantly enhance the development process and overall code quality.
- License and Cost: Review the framework’s licensing terms and potential costs associated with using certain features or add-ons. Some of the top PHP frameworks are free to use but ensure that they align with your budget and project requirements.
By carefully considering these factors, you can make an informed decision and choose the best PHP framework that empowers your web development journey and helps you build successful, high-quality applications.
Here are Top PHP Web Development Frameworks
Now you know what is PHP, why using PHP frameworks for the web development is a worthy choice and pro tips to choose the best PHP frameworks… So let’s dig deep into the list to understand the top PHP web frameworks.
1) Laravel
Laravel is a free, open-source PHP web framework that is designed for developing large-scale web applications. It was created by Taylor Otwell and has over 80,000 stars on GitHub. Laravel offers many tools to help improve your application’s development speed such as built-in authentication, caching, queueing, validation, and more.
It’s permissive licensing also allows you to modify its source code. In addition to being open-source, Laravel was named one of the most popular frameworks in 2018 with nearly 2 million views on GITHUB!
Laravel also goes very well for eCommerce development.
Read more to know the average cost to hire full-stack developer in India.
Key Features Of Laravel
Key Features of Laravel are: MVC Framework, Object-oriented, Cloud Computing, Social Authentication, Active Record, Built-in Queue, Lending Library, Templating Engine, Testing Support, Support Code Documentation
2) CodeIgniter
CodeIgniter is a free, open-source web application framework with a very small footprint and built-in PHP. It allows you to develop and maintain large-scale applications as well as small scripts quickly. CodeIgniter can take advantage of object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques to help you develop complex systems while staying relatively easy to understand.
Whether your project requires five pages or 50,000, whether it is run by one person or many, CodeIgniter can be there for you.
Key features of Codeigniter
CodeIgniter is an application development framework that enables you to develop database-driven websites and web applications. It provides an architectural design, a set of libraries (or classes), and a development methodology that helps speed up web application development. CodeIgniter makes use of Model View Controller (MVC) architecture which separates your application’s logic from its display, thus resulting in better maintainability, extensibility, and interoperability.
The library also allows developers to manage cookies, sessions, and authentication by default. Other frameworks offer but provide no support for them by default. With CodeIgniter installed you can write clean code with fewer coding errors since it supports PDO databases for improved performance.
Here is a comparison table for the top two PHP frameworks-
Image Source: netsolutions
3) Yii2
Yii2 is an open-source, object-oriented PHP framework for developing web applications rapidly and effectively. Yii was created by a team at CCRi in 2009. It is released under New BSD License and it’s free to use in both commercial and non-commercial projects. It can run on any platform that supports PHP 5.3 or higher, with some enhancements available for Apache 2.4+ servers only;
Apache 2.2 will also work but only in legacy mode, while support was dropped on March 23th, 2015; Nginx 1.8+ servers are supported via FastCGI interface with enhanced event handlers (via ServerSignal), etc…
Key Features of Yii2
Yii2 is one of the most powerful frameworks for developing modern web applications, including cross-platform mobile apps. With a strong focus on object-oriented programming, clean code, and testability principles, Yii2 helps developers rapidly design and build fully functional software applications with fewer lines of code. It’s safe to say that if you can’t use Yii2 to solve your problem—you probably can’t solve it at all.
Along with its extremely fast performance, user-friendliness and great documentation are two other standout features of Yii2. The framework also offers extensive community support; among many other things, Yii2 comes with built-in support for database migrations and an excellent debugging mechanism for integration tests.
Read More: Top PHP Web Development Companies in India for 2024
4) CakePHP
CakePHP is a widely used and highly supported rapid application development framework for PHP. It features a component-based architecture that allows for great code reusability, a very convenient inversion of the control system, and excellent documentation. Although it may not be as mature as other frameworks, it’s certainly worth your attention.
The project is being developed by an open community and has been gaining popularity recently thanks to its reliability, solid approach, and extensibility. As such, you can use CakePHP to develop just about any type of website – from simple brochure websites to complex eCommerce stores.
Key features of CakePHP
CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications. CakePHP facilitates faster development by ensuring common tasks are automated. By default, it comes with built-in authentication and routing systems.
5) Symfony
Symfony is a set of reusable PHP components and a web application framework. It is one of the most popular frameworks used by developers today. The rapid growth of its user base can be attributed to its robust ecosystem, which allows developers to customize it according to their needs while minimizing code duplication.
Symfony2 is a modern and flexible web application development framework that can be used for developing enterprise applications.
Key features of Symfony
It’s packed with features ranging from microservices, decoupled architecture, inversion of control, internationalization and localization (i18n/L10n), unit testing, front-end focused architecture through Twig or even Templating system integration for other frameworks like Yii or Laravel 4+ routing with @ParamConverter@.
6) FuelPHP
FuelPHP is a feature-rich web framework, written in PHP. It takes advantage of recent developments in programming language design and it implements modern standards such as PSR-0 and PSR-4. This makes it very easy to include a wide variety of functionality while making your code decoupled and interoperable with little effort on your part.
FuelPHP was created by Jeremy Mikola (software developer) & Phil Sturgeon (web agency owner). Both are located in Minnesota, USA. FuelPHP is distributed under MIT License terms but support is offered at pay per project fee.
Key Features of FuelPHP
FuelPHP is a free and open-source, full-stack web framework for developing high-performance web applications using PHP 5.3+. It allows developers to create both small, dynamic websites or large scalable enterprise applications on top of Symfony2 components. FuelPHP’s ultimate goal is to develop something that can be used by anyone without complex configuration and without performance hitches.
7) Phalcon
Phalcon is an open-source web framework implemented as a C extension offering high performance and lower resource consumption. Phalcon is primarily used for developing web applications. Phalcon was written in C, therefore it’s faster than other popular PHP frameworks that are written in scripting languages such as Perl or Ruby on Rails.
Phalcon was designed to develop complex enterprise-level websites requiring high performance, scalability, and maximum productivity with a small footprint. This framework is also very useful for applications that process lots of data or require real-time features such as chat rooms or multiplayer games.
Key features of Phalcon
Phalcon is a free, open-source PHP framework designed for high performance. It is implemented as a C extension offering high performance and lower resource consumption. It features a rich set of functionality including support for several databases (such as PostgreSQL, SQLite, MySQL, etc.), web services (REST and WebSocket), caching and much more.
8) Zend Framework
Zend Framework is an open-source98 framework for developing web applications and services using PHP 5. It consists of a collection of libraries, including Zend Engine, which provides many features commonly used in web development. Zend Framework was released on October 1, 2005, under an open-source license by Zend Technologies Ltd., a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation (from December 2007 to July 2009).
From version 1.10 onwards it is dual-licensed under both LGPL 2.1 and commercial licenses (including proprietary software licenses). To promote widespread adoption, some components are offered without charge under a separate GPL compatible license named ZubEvent.
Key features of Zend
If you are looking for a web development framework in PHP then Zend is a good choice for you. Zend has been around for quite some time now and is a tried and tested product, it can be used to develop applications across all platforms. It also allows easy access to data through SQL in an Object-oriented manner.
9) Slim
Slim is a micro-framework, focused on simplicity and ease of use. It has few dependencies, making it extremely easy to integrate into your existing project. It also has an expressive, clean syntax that offers you powerful capabilities without much ceremony.
If you’re building a new project and looking for a way to get started with little or no code, Slim may be right for you.
Key features of Slim
Slim has a philosophy of simplicity, and many developers agree that it does a good job of staying true to its mission. As such, Slim aims to be easy to learn and get up-and-running with. In addition, Slim tries not to impose strict structure on projects and instead stays flexible enough for users to customize it as needed.
10) PHPixie
PHPixie is a very small micro-framework. The only thing it can do is execute a single file. If you need more, it’s time to switch to another framework. This has several benefits: Easy installation and setup, no configuration, simple learning curve (but no routing or anything like that). All in all, it’s a very lightweight, yet complete framework for applications that do not require complex functionality.
Key Features of PHPixie
Combining all important characteristics and properties of modern frameworks, it provides essential tools for simplifying software development in areas that are relevant for both small and large projects. It is a Swiss army knife that can be used to solve a wide range of problems.
Conclusion
With the end of this blog, hopefully, you understand the importance of selecting the best framework for your web app development project as it can significantly impact the efficiency, scalability, and security of your app. All the frameworks of PHP have their own strengths and limits, so there is no such winner or loss becuase the ultimate choice of framework is majorly dependent upon your app development requirements.
You can hire web developers in India to pick the right PHP framework that aligns with your business requirements. At AppsDevPro, we understand the paramount importance of choosing the right PHP framework for web app development.
So if you have any project requirements and looking for the best app developers that enables you build strong app, then you can Contact Us.
FAQs
Are PHP web frameworks secure?
Yes, most PHP web frameworks come with built-in security features and follow best practices to protect against common web vulnerabilities. However, developers must also implement secure coding practices to ensure maximum security.
Can I use a PHP web framework for small projects?
Yes, PHP web frameworks are suitable for projects of all sizes. They offer flexibility, code organization, and rapid development, making them beneficial even for smaller web applications.
Are PHP web frameworks free to use?
Yes, most PHP web frameworks are open-source and free to use. However, some frameworks may offer premium features or add-ons that may come with additional costs.
Can I switch PHP frameworks midway through a project?
While possible, switching PHP frameworks midway through a project can be time-consuming and challenging. It’s better to choose the right framework at the beginning to avoid significant code changes and disruptions.
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