Whether you are designing an aesthetic business website or a simple personal blog, you will need appropriate tools and knowledge in order to develop a website smoothly. Web development is not just about writing long codes and creating logics, but minimizing the code to the utmost extent and providing the best of the functionalities to the user. Moreover, you’d love to speed up the development process to achieve more in less time.

That’s where frameworks come into play. Frameworks allow you to develop a website quickly and write code in such a manner that is comprehensible. PHP developers achieve this speed and code efficiency by using ‘PHP Frameworks’.

What is a PHP Framework?

A PHP framework provides us structure to build a web application efficiently. By using a PHP framework, you can save your time, and enhance the performance of your web app.

For example, if you develop a web app on simple PHP code, it may take weeks to finish. On the other hand, you can develop the same app in just a couple of days, if you use a PHP framework. In short, you don’t have to write the same code again and again in multiple sections, because it follows OOP principles. Their development-fastening and security features are the reason why PHP frameworks are so popular these days.

Some Popular PHP Frameworks

Laravel

Laravel is arguably the most loved PHP framework due to its routing, caching, authentication, and user management ability. Thousands of PHP developers use it to develop a web app that saves their time and enhance the efficiency of their code.

Laravel is used for huge enterprise-level applications, or simple JSON APIs, that means it perfectly suits all types and sizes of projects.

Laravel is built on top of several Symfony components that lay a solid foundation for reliable code. It’s easy to manage your application’s third-party packages, and it works great MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and SQLite.

Laravel has all the features required for building robust applications with a sophisticated backend. Moreover, there are plenty of customization options available for developers to develop a backend of their app efficiently.

CakePHP

Although the framework is quite old – it was launched some 15 years ago – it is still quite popular. The excellent documentation and outstanding safekeeping tools are available with the framework that makes this framework worth using. Moreover, it has some excellent security tools like input validation, cross-site scripting, and cross-site request forgery or CSRF protection.

You can develop an application at a fast pace by using code generation features to rapidly build prototypes. There’s nothing like complicated configuration – just set up your database and you’re ready to go.

Symfony

Symfony has been in the market since 2015 and is the preferred framework of many developers due to its flexibility. It has featured in the list of top ten PHP frameworks for multiple numbers of times and is still very popular.

It gives you the freedom to choose the software components that you want to use, and don’t have to worry about using existing ‘de facto’ standards of PHP, such as PHPUnit, and naming conventions for classes.

You can choose the Full Stack (complete) version if you want to develop a complex application or Brick by Brick, and build your own framework according to the functionality that you seek.

CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter is a small size PHP framework suitable for developing dynamic websites. It comes with a small footprint that can be easily uploaded directly to your hosting without any issues. It offers ample prebuilt modules that help with constructing reusable and robust components.

Its key features include an MVC architecture, top-notch error handling, inbuilt security tools, and simple and excellent documentation. Compared to all other frameworks in the list, CodeIgniter is considerably faster.

It’s an ideal choice when you want to develop lightweight applications to run on modest servers. Moreover, it has some additional useful features like unit testing, form validation, and community support.

Slim

The framework is particularly used for building small web application projects which don’t require a full-stack PHP framework. Point to note here is that Slim framework can also be used to build RESTful apps and APIs due to their stunning features that include HTTP caching and URL routing.

If you want to learn a PHP framework that comes with user-friendly technical documentation, then Slim is the right choice for you.It is seen that full-fledged framework can be overkill. While micro-frameworks can enable rapid application development and prototyping without any performance issues that can come with a large framework.

Slim is sort of a micro PHP framework that helps you to write simple, yet powerful web application and APIs, featuring standard and custom HTTP methods, route parameters, page templates, and route redirects.