Freelance PHP

15 PHP Frameworks

2011-07-05T01:39:00.000-07:00

Stuck on what PHP Framework to use for an upcoming project?

Look no further!

Frameworks are the streamlined flow of PHP codes meshed up and baked for you to just use and implement. PHP frameworks are the result of codes written by many talented developers around the world. In other words, PHP frameworks help to promote rapid application development (RAD), which saves you time, helps build more stable applications, and reduces the amount of repetitive coding for developers.

Recess Framework

Recess is a RESTful PHP framework that provides a fun and enjoyable development experience for beginner and seasoned developers alike. If you want a full featured RESTful web application without having to master the command line or learn complicated deployment recipes, Recess is for you. Recess is fast, light-weight, and has a very small footprint—ideal for LAMP development and drag-and-drop deployment to shared hosts. Recess is a modern framework that uses a loosely-coupled Model-View-Controller architecture designed and optimized specifically for PHP 5.

Cake PHP

CakePHP might just be the most popular PHP framework around right now. Also uses the MVC framework. CakePHP is a little heavier than CodeIgniter and Kohana but has it has its own advantages: It has plenty of documentation which makes it fun and easy to understand, an interesting collection of helper classes developed by the community and having a well studied and structured approach on how to bake your cake.

Vork

Vork is intuitive & easy to use and does not have the overhead or performance-penalty typical in PHP frameworks. Since Vork removes the undesirable qualities of utilizing a framework we felt that it is a framework that cuts away all the negative framework qualities leaving only the benefits and so we split the word “framework” straight through the letter “W” leaving just “Vork”.

Simple PHP Framework

The Simple PHP Framework is a pragmatic approach to building websites with PHP 5. It’s geared towards web design shops and freelance programmers looking for a common foundation to quickly bring web projects to life.

Zend Framework

Extending the art & spirit of PHP, Zend Framework is based on simplicity, object-oriented best practices, corporate friendly licensing, and a rigorously tested agile codebase. Zend Framework is focused on building more secure, reliable, and modern Web 2.0 applications & web services, and consuming widely available APIs from leading vendors like Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, Flickr, as well as API providers and cataloguers like StrikeIron and ProgrammableWeb.

Fat Free

Condensed in a single 55KB file, the framework’s simple domain-specific language gives you access to Fat-Free’s all-purpose template engine, flexible cache, automatic spam protection, integrated unit testing tools, and code profiler. It’s so small and fast – it even has a bandwidth throttle for controlling Web server traffic. It’s also the only framework that shields you from bandwidth theft and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks.

Akelos

The Akelos PHP Framework is a web application development platform based on the MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern similar to Ruby on Rails. It aims at helping programmers build multilingual database-backed web applications and write less code, which allows for the creation of uniform, simple to understand scripts.

Flourish

Flourish is a PHP unframework — a general-purpose, object-oriented library. It has a modular architecture, meaning it isn’t strictly MVC. It focuses on being secure, well documented and easy to use, while solving problems intrinsic to web development.

Konstrukt

Konstrukt is a very light weight PHP framework with the following key aspects:

Controllers are resources
URI-to-controller-mapping gives your application a logical structure
Routing based on logic rather than rules
Nested controllers supports composite view rendering

CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter is a powerful, high-performance, open-source PHP framework that helps you author PHP applications rapidly. CodeIgniter is known for having a light footprint, there by reducing your server’s work.

LightVC

LightVC is comparable to, although unlike, CakePHP, Code Igniter, symfony, Solar, and Zend Framework to name a few. It’s major difference is that it does not try to be a full “Web framework” and instead tries to solve the need for an MVC that isn’t coupled to other tools.

Adroit

Adroit is a lightweight PHP 5 MVC framework that is geared towards helping you develop faster. The main motivation behind Adroit is to keep it simple, but provide useful features that developers want. Whether you’re just beginning web-application development, or a seasoned veteran, Adroit can help make that experience better.

Tekuna

Tekuna is a compact framework for web-based applications. It provides a stable basis and a generic infrastructure for your projects. Tekuna has a very small footprint and will not pollute your codebase with unnecessary stuff.

UltraLite

Vision Media created the UltraLite framework with a need for a light weight, high performance, ajax ready, feature rich framework. Common frameworks such as CakePHP and Codeigniter are certainly great frameworks and we encourage you to consider them both as well as others. However all of this said, UltraLite will prove to be lighter, faster, along with an extremely simplified learning curve.

Zephyr

Zephyr is an ajax based framework for php5 developers. you can easily develop business applications using this robust framework. this is extremely easy to learn and very simple to implement. you can deliver a full fledged ajax application with strong business layer in backend within some minutes. installation and deployment of packages that you develop for zephyr is hassle free. moreover you will get all the features of most popular templating engine “smarty” and powerfull data access layer “adoDB”. lets go through the documentation process to discover how easy is to develop an ajax application using zephyr framework.

Top 7 PHP Security Blunders

2011-07-05T01:17:00.000-07:00

Brilliant article about PHP Security. Good reading for newbies and pros alike :)

Part 1

Part 2

3 Brilliant PHP Books

2011-06-17T15:11:00.000-07:00

These books are just a few of the thousands of books available covering all aspects of PHP.

I believe these 3 are the best of the bunch and cover the essentials.

PHP MySQL Web Development

Beginning PHP MySQL Professional Development

Pro PHP Security

Yo dawg...

2011-06-15T08:19:00.000-07:00

I heard yo like driving, so we put a car in yo van, so yo can drive whilst yo drive

Source: http://jalopnik.com/5812119/how-did-this-car-get-inside-of-this-van

PHP Framework Benchmarks

2011-06-14T03:03:00.000-07:00

So, when I recently started doing a new project, I asked myself "What PHP Framework should I use?"

I was suggested CodeIgniter - its fast, easy to get to grips with and pretty lightweight file size-wise.

Speed is a big thing for me, and I know Frameworks like Zend are terribly bloated.

I found this nice article that discusses the different Frameworks and benchmarks them. It's pleasing to see that CI comes in second on this list :)

PHP Frameworks Benchmarked

Calculate distance between two points

2011-06-13T06:05:00.000-07:00

So whilst working with Google Maps lately, I found this super-useful snippet that calculates the distance between two points, using longitdue and latitude.

Code:

function distance($lat1, $lon1, $lat2, $lon2, $unit) { 
$theta = $lon1 - $lon2;
$dist = sin(deg2rad($lat1)) * sin(deg2rad($lat2)) + cos(deg2rad($lat1)) * cos(deg2rad($lat2)) * cos(deg2rad($theta));
$dist = acos($dist);
$dist = rad2deg($dist);
$miles = $dist * 60 * 1.1515;
$unit = strtoupper($unit);

if ($unit == "K") {
return ($miles * 1.609344);
} else if ($unit == "N") {
return ($miles * 0.8684);
} else {
return $miles;
}
}

Usage:

echo distance(32.9697, -96.80322, 29.46786, -98.53506, "k")." kilometers";

Credit: PHPSnippets.info

Some PHP Best Practices

2011-06-12T13:08:00.000-07:00

nb - Some tips may be contradictory, so please use these at your own risk :)

Massive List of PHP Articles

2011-06-11T04:25:00.000-07:00

Below is a huge list of links to various PHP related articles that should help you out when starting a freelance or personal project.

For Beginners

Code Organisation

Advanced

Applications

Tips and Best Practices

Tutorials

Security

Framework

PHP Toolbox

Ion_Auth for CodeIgniter

2011-06-10T12:32:00.001-07:00

Today I am promoting the awesome third-party library, Ion_Auth, for CI.

It is a fully fledged authorisation library, allowing you to set up secured areas, user groups, profiles, the lot!

I have used it on several projects and it has yet to let me down.

http://codeigniter.com/wiki/Ion_Auth_-_Lightweight_Auth_System/

Adventure Game Update

2011-06-07T09:00:00.000-07:00

I haven't had chance to work much more on my PHP Adventure Game as of late, however I will be free to start afresh on this project soon.

Due to my new found love for CodeIgniter, I will be rebuilding the game using this framework. Hopefully I can get to the same point I was at before, much quicker and the whole project itself will be neater and more robust :)

CodeIgniter

2011-06-07T05:19:00.001-07:00

So I have been using CodeIgniter (CI) for the past 7 months and I am more then impressed!

Very well maintained Framework, with lots of available additional libraries and modifications by fellow CI Community peeps.

I am currently finishing a project using CI v1, however v2 has been released and is a bit tighter.

Stay tuned for more insights :)

PHP Adventure Game

2010-10-11T16:42:00.000-07:00

So today I did some work on my PHP Adventure Game.

I am using it as an excuse to learn OOPHP and also to make something that I hope people will one day actually play!

New Blog

2010-09-27T14:36:00.001-07:00

Welcome to my new blog!

I am a UK based Freelance PHP Developer, specialising in bespoke Web Systems.