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A few years ago, PHP had several large frameworks (e.g. CakePHP, CodeIgniter, and so on). Each framework was an island and provided its own implementation of features commonly found in other frameworks.

More like frameworks deliberately exist to create islands with their own implementation of features commonly found in the language itself:

• this vs this
• this vs this
• this vs this

and on, and on, and on...

The headline should read, "Derps fall for new patchwork to solve self-inflicted fracturing problem, film at 11"

A few years ago, PHP had several large frameworks (e.g. CakePHP, CodeIgniter, and so on). Each framework was an island and provided its own implementation of features commonly found in other frameworks.

More like frameworks deliberately exist to create islands with their own implementation of features commonly found in the language itself:

• this vs this
• this vs this
• this vs this

and on, and on, and on...

The headline should read, "Derps fall for new patchwork to solve self-inflicted fracturing problem, film at 11"

A few years ago, PHP had several large frameworks (e.g. CakePHP, CodeIgniter, and so on). Each framework was an island and provided its own implementation of features commonly found in other frameworks.

More like frameworks deliberately exist to create islands with their own implementation of features commonly found in the language itself:

• this vs this
• this vs this
• this vs this

and on, and on, and on...

The headline should read, "Derps fall for new patchwork to solve self-inflicted fracturing problem, film at 11"

If you have an existing base of PHP and Ruby developers then Cake sounds like the way to go to meet them both in the middle so everyone can pick it up fairly quickly. Cake is based on many of the same concepts as Ruby on Rails so everyone should be fairly at home. It is still PHP though so it won't force all your dev team to write better code as much as RoR will. The flexibility of a PHP base can be a plus though unless it is put in the wrong hands.

http://cakephp.org/

Personally I am struggling through my first Zend Framework Project at the moment but I am not sure I would recommend it as it has caused me a few too many frustrations. I do worry that this will just knock all the other PHP Frameworks into the long grass though as it is by the same people as PHP. I am starting to see quite a few job offers coming my way now I have added Zend Framework to my CV so it does seem to be very popular for some reason.

I just noticed you also mention having a Python powered backend, this may change my advice above but it does bring about another question: Do you really need so many different technologies? Surely this must drive up your costs considerably as you need developers with a much wider skill set or more of them.

Rails definitely uses more CPU time. However, it can make development of some kinds of things much faster, and you can work at higher levels of abstraction in Ruby than PHP.

Wow, color me surprised, a framework for a language makes development faster than the raw language. It's a shame there aren't frameworks available for PHP that could cut development time in a similar manner as Rails does for Ruby...

RoR is (was?) popular because it brought a lot of great ideas to the table, with a decent implementation. Those ideas have by now been stolen/copied by several other frameworks in your language of choice.

If you know PHP, check out http://www.cakephp.org/
If you know perl, check out http://www.catalystframework.org/

At my company, we have switching from legacy/inhouse PHP to cakePHP for new projects, and the fact of using a decent/modern MVC framework has already more than paid for the learning curve by saving weeks of development time.

Not only is it now possible to hire people who know the specific framework that we're using, but I know that the development patterns I'm using now can easily be transferred to any of the other Rails-knockoff frameworks, even across languages.

CakePHP Framework (supports PHP5 & PHP4), Version 1.2 Stable due any time soon.
Symfony. PHP 5 Meta Framework using Propel and other layer components. The accompaning book (free PDF, buyable dead-tree) is a very good documentation.
Prado. Event-Oriented PHP 5 Framework. Very interesting.
Code Igniter. Lightweight PHP Framework for smaller stuff. Neat website.

Django. Python Framework.
TurboGears. Python Meta Framework using some 3rd Party stuff like Templating layers and such.
Zope Web Application Server. To date unmatched. What Rails wants to be when it grows up.

This breaks my brain, even for the normally stereotypically slow, stereotypically technology-shy government (though I will say that a lot of the Government of Canada sites work surprisingly well in my experience).

SQL queries IN THE QUERY STRING. Someone reading their FIRST BOOK on web development would know not to do that! And now God help the people who have been affected by this: try proving to the government that you're not a sexual offender when you're already on their list.

SQL injections. Learn them. Learn how to mitigate them (a PHP-specific example, but there are similar mitigation techniques for other languages). And I mean, hell, in a site like this (and especially with programmers apparently this bad), stored procedures might be the thing to implement. Or even better, use a framework like CakePHP, Rails, or Django with this sort of sanitation built into the queries it generates.

Ugh. I hope someone gets fired for this. I bet, though, that in reality this was programmed by the lowest bidder.

They briefly mentioned Haml... which has made a big impact in the Rails and Cake PHP development communities. Yes.... I made it and I'm pimping it here.

• Main/Ruby Haml: http://haml.hamptoncatlin.com/
• Cake PHP Haml: http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/view/haml-markup-haiku

Enjoy, bitchez!

Rails was borne of a production application: Basecamp. It didn't come into existence because they "hated EVERYONE!" The application had already been built in Ruby, and DHH saw that there was a lot of the system that could be reused. He packaged it up, and released it under the name "Ruby on Rails."

Rails has gotten hyped, no question, but the level of rhetoric leveled against it has gotten to the point where people are unwilling to acknowledge that it is a capable framework. Great marketing only gets you so far, and like so many other wildly popular "products," at the end of the day people tend to use what works for them. There aren't many examples - open-source or closed - of things that get lots of acclaim without deserving any of it. Your dislike of Rails has nothing to do with Rails itself, but rather how you perceive it to be portrayed. We all remember the Java hype. We all remember the .NET hype. Hype surrounds everything new, and Rails is new. The hype will die down, and when it does, what you'll find is that it will settle into its own area of web application development, right alongside all of the other great frameworks, languages, etc. Java didn't really revolutionize the world the way we were told it would. It did, however, become a very capable branch of application development, and thousands of developers make an excellent living doing it.

Sure, we sometimes joke about Ruby on Rails being "better" than the alternatives, but for professional Rails developers it's more about having a good time than anything else. It might even happen to have something to do with so many of us liking Macs - we Mac-users are a rather devoted bunch. Sometimes it's easy to read too much into it, and I think that's what has happened here. I attended RailsConf this year, and for the most part the people I met were enthusiastic developers who were making web applications and having a pretty good time doing it. If the work you're doing with not-Rails is working, there is little reason to believe that the existence of Rails or even the current enthusiasm for it is going to translate into competitive pressure you won't be able to handle. If you're good at what you do, and already have development tools and practices that work for you, none of that is going to change, and that doesn't mean you don't stand to benefit from it. Just take a look at CakePHP.

Any negative impact Rails has will be felt by the people on the fringe. Those who don't really know how to develop applications, and are ill-suited to the tasks with which they are currently tasked. Every time something comes along that attempts to elevate the discussion, there will be those unable to keep up.

That does not mean that you stop innovating. That's simply the nature of competition. If you have confidence in your work, you have nothing to fear, and more importantly, no reason to hate.

CakePHP and Symfony are the two 400 pound Gorillas in the PHP FW Arena. Zend Framework is being pushed big time by Zend and a huge wave of hype they managed to build within the last 10 weeks or so but I advise everyone not to fall for the hype until it's riped a bit. It's not nearly as mature or as well tested as Symfony or Cake and could use another year or two on the market before it has proven itself.

I'm curious, did you ever try Symfony or CakePHP? If so, I'd be interested in hearing what you liked or disliked about them compared both to Rails and to PHP development without a framework.

CakePHP ( http://www.cakephp.org/ ) is a framework with all the advantages of ruby on rails, but using PHP as it's language. So is a very good option for every PHP programmer who wants order, flexibility and ease of use, avoiding repetitive tasks such as CRUD and the use of helpers (i.e Html forms, Ajax) to increment productivity and maintenance. As stated on their website:
"Cake is a rapid development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility."
For a nice introduction read the manual ( http://manual.cakephp.org/ ) and try the 15 minute blog tutorial, and for scripts, plugins, and a lot of community code try the bakery ( http://bakery.cakephp.org/ ).
Any programmer that wants Rails' advantages combined with PHP's flexibility, documentation, server support should try this. Greetings

CakePHP ( http://www.cakephp.org/ ) is a framework with all the advantages of ruby on rails, but using PHP as it's language. So is a very good option for every PHP programmer who wants order, flexibility and ease of use, avoiding repetitive tasks such as CRUD and the use of helpers (i.e Html forms, Ajax) to increment productivity and maintenance. As stated on their website:
"Cake is a rapid development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility."
For a nice introduction read the manual ( http://manual.cakephp.org/ ) and try the 15 minute blog tutorial, and for scripts, plugins, and a lot of community code try the bakery ( http://bakery.cakephp.org/ ).
Any programmer that wants Rails' advantages combined with PHP's flexibility, documentation, server support should try this. Greetings

CakePHP ( http://www.cakephp.org/ ) is a framework with all the advantages of ruby on rails, but using PHP as it's language. So is a very good option for every PHP programmer who wants order, flexibility and ease of use, avoiding repetitive tasks such as CRUD and the use of helpers (i.e Html forms, Ajax) to increment productivity and maintenance. As stated on their website:
"Cake is a rapid development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility."
For a nice introduction read the manual ( http://manual.cakephp.org/ ) and try the 15 minute blog tutorial, and for scripts, plugins, and a lot of community code try the bakery ( http://bakery.cakephp.org/ ).
Any programmer that wants Rails' advantages combined with PHP's flexibility, documentation, server support should try this. Greetings

Zope. - What Rails wants to be when it grows up.

Also be sure to check out Plone, Symfony, Django, CakePHP, Prado and Turbogears before you blindly join the overhyped Rails bandwagon.

So use CakePHP and your problems and issues with PHP will be solved...

If this year was 2000 then I would agree with you. PHP has quite a few MVC frameworks that have been around for some time and are fairly extensively used in enterprise environments. If you know any developers embedding their PHP in the HTML in large apps please ask them to stop.

Here is a small example of a few MVCs out there.
CakePHP - http://www.cakephp.org/
Symfony - http://www.symfony-project.com/
Zend Framework - http://framework.zend.com/

Your way of thinking is outdated. There are many frameworks that facilitate proper MVC, templating, and a separation of duties. Check out CodeIgniter, CakePHP, and symfony, three of the most popular frameworks for PHP. Development techniques and approaches in PHP have changed significantly in the last few years.

Not to start a little argument over PHP and Python, but you're comparing apples with oranges here. You are saying that PHP is insecure, its semantics are undesirable and so are its standard libraries, database interfacing, interpreter and performance, and then you come along saying how awesome Django is, disregarding that actually you're comparing a language with a framework.

There are a handful of decent PHP frameworks out there, with others coming along, which you can take and compare with Django, but please don't bash the language because you don't like its semantics, you have something personal with it or you didn't take the time to choose a decent framework.

Regarding the database interfacing support, I beg to differ, I believe PHP has been supporting a large number of databases for a longer while than most of the other web scripting languages out there today.

That's why Smart Developers (C) use http://cakephp.org/ ;)

Knock it off allready.
I've had enough of the eternal Dimwits constantly bashing this or that with "MySQL not scalable" "PHP not scalable", blablabla.
PHP has arrived in the enterprise market. That's a fact. Yes, I know, Java has been there for 8 years, PHP is messy and quirky (so is Perl), MySQL isn't a DB, we've heard it all before.
In case you haven't noticed: PHP 5 is out. It's a full blown, mature PL and arguably the 400 pound gorilla of SSI solutions with a long history. MySQL 5 is out aswell. It's a full blown DB and comes with tons of free x-platform admin and design tools that make building the outline of a large webapp a walk in the park and thus scares the living daylights out of Oracle and IBM. You may have noticed IBM virtually giving their DB2 away for free (beer) since just a few months ago. Guess how that happend.
Imagine someone would come along and tell you that large-scale webapps in Perl are a pipedream. Not to far-fetched in this context, no? And what about slashdot and kuro5hin?

PHP is as good a technology as any other in use when it comes to building large webapps (point in case: www.rubyonrails.org/index.php/ ). Industry strength PHP Frameworks are poping up left, right and center and other places like mushrooms after the rain. And as for MySQL "not being ready for large, scalable apps" - you're being silly.

For years I've been working with pure, vanilla PHP outside of any sort of buzzword framework. That's not to say that my code was unorganized (quite the opposite, I'm pretty anal when it comes to code clarity), just that I believed as the original poster did that MVC frameworks and the like weren't worth the time.

I've recently started experimenting with CakePHP, and it has somewhat changed my thinking on the matter.

A lot of things we tend to do, especially in web development, get repeated over and over. Data validation, SELECT statements and their JOINs, administration backends, login systems... I could go on. In my experience, it's been when I've been bored to death of doing something repetitively that errors would start to creep into my code. It's pure probability: the more you do something, the better chance you have of one of those things having something wrong with it.

RAD solutions posit a solution to this, centralizing all those repetitive things so you avoid having to type the same thing over and over, and thereby reducing the chance that there is an error in any one of those repeated things. If there's an error in the actual framework, one can fix it, ideally, in one location rather than throughout a script (though the frameworks themselves tend to be closely scrutinized to avoid any obvious issues).

I guess what I'm trying to say is that coding less can mean coding better, as long as you understand why you're coding less, and not doing it simply because you can.

But see, that's a problem I've encountered recently; one of my team members for a project we're working on was all gung-ho about doing it in Rails, convinced that we could put things together as "one-liners" (his favourite word now, it seems). From the early stages, he was adamant that we do it in Rails, even though neither myself nor the third person in the group knew Ruby or Rails. So about halfway through the planning stages, I asked the guy what projects he had coded in Rails in the past.

He'd watched the screencast and done the tutorial from a Rails book. That's it.

Now, I'm not saying learning Rails (and Ruby) is a bad thing, don't get me wrong. But in early discussions of the project far before this point I'd made it clear that I had about six years of solid, real-world PHP experience and the third member had about a year.

If the project were more open-ended, we may have ended up trying to do it in Rails. However, having a deadline, we ended up deciding to do the project in CakePHP, a bit of a compromise. So far, it's worked out really well for us, and we still get the benefit of coding in a MVC RAD framework.

But yeah, I think lots of people buy into the hype of Rails too easily without thinking about it or trying anything different from the hand-held tutorials.

try http://cakephp.org/ to take a breath with php

Speaking of rails and cake...

http://cakephp.org/ just released 0.10.9 about a week ago.

CakePHP http://www.cakephp.org/

For what it's worth, CakePHP lets you the same thing RoR does, without having to learn Ruby. Having said that, the "this php app is horribly written. Thank goodness for this completely different framework and language that are not an e-commerce package" comment is a bit of a non sequitur if you ask me, and I think that was kv9's point. jason

CakePHP, for example.

Why is this getting press? Maybe cause they say 'platform', 'enterprise', and 'scalability' too many times in a single paragraph.

Oh, and Jon Hicks called. He wants his logo back.

http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/time-to-redes ign-the-logo-methinks ;)

http://www.cakephp.org/
check its Object class implementation... for php4

JASPF (Just another silly PHP framework)

If you are looking for quick app development and you aren't joe home user making a website you are going to need something thats based off a model -> view -> controller architecture. Symphony does this, so does the cake framework.

I guess you can use JSON, and XML data formats with prototype, but I just use plain old text to accomplish whatever I want.

Prototype is also used in Ruby on Rails and its PHP analogue CAKE, and also the excellent perl framework Catalyst

There are a few. I've never used them, so I can't speak to their quality, but apparently work is being done on exactly what you ask:

Biscuit: http://bennolan.com/biscuit/
Qcodo: http://www.gadgetopia.com/post/4726
Cake: http://cakephp.org/ ... just to name a few. I just google'd for 'php rails', and got lots of interesting links.

Some developers have started to create a sort of PHP version of Rails at http://www.cakephp.org/

Cake is a rapid development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.

I'm just using it for a week now, ruby might be better, but after erlang I'm too tired to learn new languages for a while.

Rails is a MVC framework built on Ruby.
PHP is NOT a framework.

If you feel like comparing/extolling the virtues of RoR compared to PHP, then try to at least be logical enough to compare RoR to a MVC framework built on PHP. There are several (though none as popular as RoR at the moment). Some are trying to imitate Struts and others trying to mimic RoR.

In fact, Zend is quite aware of RoR's popularity is in the process of creating its own framework to compete: the Zend Framework.

CakePHP, a rapid development framework for PHP, has a pretty decent guide of coding standards. It is short and might be a good place to start.

CakePHP, a rapid development framework for PHP, has a pretty decent guide of coding standards. It is short and might be a good place to start.

There is nothing in PHP that discourages you from mixing logic and presentation, but there is also nothing discouraging you from separating them either. This is exactly what makes PHP great for dirty hacks and large web apps alike.

Templating is part of the solution, but so is good app design. If you don't want to mix your logic, you simply need to code it that way. Zend PHP Framework will help enforce some of the same separation as Java does, but it's not strictly necessary. You can do MVC app design without much trouble. Take a look at Sitepoint's PHP Application Design forum (http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/forumdisplay.php? f=147).

There are also Ruby on Rails-type frameworks such as CakePHP (http://www.cakephp.org./

Well, it certainly encourages you to just throw everything together in a single file, but it's a programming language like any other, so it's also possible to separate everything and build complete MVC-frameworks, for example there's Cake which looks like a clone of Ruby on Rails.

Oh, uh, yeah, how about cake? It's a rails knockoff for php.

I haven't used it (I only learned about it from one of the endless /. RoR articles), but Cake is another option. If nothing else, the logo is making me hungry.

Why not PHP with Cake? Basically, an MVC based approach to PHP, plus all the goodies of a clean, rapid app development library.