Orite dev team have been working on our own MVC PHP dev framework for quite few years, which we utilize
Adodb for database abstraction and
TemplatePower for View template, and we have the handy oModel (Orite Model) to create all database tables as class objects, so all the database operations are nicely layed out in 3 layers. However we write our own Control, which consists of lots of inclusions (of classes and libraries) and dirty (not very readable) procedure logic etc.
It's not too much of a hassle to develop on the Orite MVC framework, since the simplicity of it's structure and logic. However in order to do tricks like Ajax, URL rewriting, it requires all the knowledge about PHP MySQL HTML Javascript and Apache, and sometime because the different deployment environment one has to learn different platforms, we have been deploy on Linux (various distro), Windows (different versions) and Solaris.
Although the Orite MVC framework performed for years, we decided to go something else. Since for the new year we are proposing few large-scale community portal sites, which would require more collabrative dev and constant maintenance. Here we set out the feature request for the framework we looking for which must have,
- MVC pattern, since its what we familiar and happy with
- No non-sense folder structure, not too flexible or too restricted
- Solid and performance database abstraction layer, support transactions
- Good error handling and reporting
- URL management, routing and filtering
- Layered theme, layout, view
- Code generation
- Strict PHP5 implementation
- Good community support and active development
- Easy learning and start
- Performance and security
Would be bonus to have,
- Templating
- Ajax
- Caching
- Built-in useful libraries (validation, emailing, etc)
- Shell support for cron jobs
- I18n
- Database migration
We know it's not an easy task to find THE right PHP framework to use and stick with, since there are quite few available on the market and all have quite good reputation. Also because the evolving of the technology and vary of our project scope. So we decide to firstly pick a few popular ones and do our own testing and benchmarking, that's the only way to choose properly.
We'll follow up with the results...
If you are using a PHP framework and think that's the best, please feel free to post a comment below.
