You need MySQL High Performance and MySQL High Availability for your PHP Web Application, but you have a low budget!

No problem – take a look @ the crVCL PHP Framework http://en.cr-solutions.net/p/projects

and make your business fail-safe with standard Linux Heartbeat in cooperation with the MySQL library of the crVCL PHP Framework
and enjoy also so many other features of the framework like MVC, Ajax and GUI component support.

Website: http://www.cr-solutions.net

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lexa-tools library is not as much a framework as a set of utililies (tools). You are free to organize the site as you’d like. No special folder structure is required. No need to declare any classes. No config files and no magic conventions. The library just arms you with a handy procedural API.

Most ideas were borrowed from Ruby on Rails when I was porting an application from Rails to PHP. If you have had experience with Rails then you would notice a lot of familiar concepts and names.

Visit the lexa-tools homepage

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The APF team is proud to anounce the new website together with the 1.11 stable release.

Revision 1.11 comes up with a revised version of the form support on the basis of taglibs. Now generic definition of validators and filters on the basis of the observer pattern is supported and forms can be easier adjusted to own needs.

The OR mapper GenericORMapper, already added in the release 1.9, was extended with tools to automatically setup and update a database. Now the developer can completely concentrate on the development of the logic of the application since the storage of the objects is completely managed by the mapper.

Part of the release’s performance optimization were optimizations in the core of the frameworks and the rework of the integrated BenchmarkTimer. It now supplies the developer with a better graphical representation of the measurements to find hot spots within an application. Thus an application can be optimally prepared for operation.

With release of version 1.11 the support for PHP 4 has been announced for discontinuation and the compatibility with PHP 5.3 has been improved. The coming version 1.12 will focus on the extension of the new form support and the rework of the configuration component.

The new release files can be downloaded from http://adventure-php-framework.org/Page/008-Downloads.

You think: “The APF is just another framework”, too? On this page you can find reasons why you should definitely use use the adventure php framework (APF)!

The APF supports you to rapidly create enterprise ready web applicatons or modules, that are fast, secure and reusable. The framework threrefore includes approved development tools to solve standard problems and implement pattern related applications.

Feature overview

The feature matrix gives you an overview of the features includes. It also compares the APF with other products.

The comparison indicators have the following meaning:

• Completely supported / completely includes
• Partially included
• Not included / not supported

When I was reading through my subscribed feeds I came across this post: Notes on Choosing a PHP Framework: A Comparison of CakePHP and the Zend Framework by Chad Kieffer.

Chad has done a great job comparing the two frameworks that he’s interested in. That inspired me to write something up for the frameworks that I prefer and use.

I began hunting for PHP frameworks ever since Ruby on Rails hit the street. Coincidentally one of the first PHP frameworks I played with was CakePHP. At that time CakePHP’s documentation was nearly non-existent so I had to seek for an alternative. I did a lot of searches, and researches, and finally I was happy to see CodeIgniter. Its user guide was what impressed me the most, I am sure many of the fellow CI users would agree with me on this one. Because of the excellent documentation, I was able to start working on projects right after I spent a few hours on the user guide! Developing apps on CI was such a breeze! Today, I develop web applications in CodeIgniter, Kohana and Zend Framework. If you want to find out how to use Zend Framework components with CI or Kohana, please read my previous blog entry: Using Zend Framework with CodeIgniter.

From version 1.2 when I first started coding on CI, to the newly released version 1.6.1 it sure is a long way. CodeIgniter has progressed well and gained many web developers’ trust, despite a few glitches. One of which was the spawn of the fork: Kohana.

CodeIgniter had some low periods where developers were all focused on pushing out new releases of ExpressionEngine, their commercial blogging/cms product. Some of the users on the CI forum got frustrated because their bug reports and feature requests were ignored. As a result of that, BlueFlame was born, and later renamed to Kohana.

Kohana is relatively unknown to the public. In fact, most of the Kohana users are ex-CI users or users that uses both CI and Kohana (like myself). According to the Kohana homepage and Wikipedia, the differences between Kohana and CodeIgniter are:

1. Strict PHP5 OOP. Offers many benefits: visibility protection, automatic class loading, overloading, interfaces, abstracts, and singletons.
2. Kohana has joined the GoPHP5 initiative. All releases from 2.2 on will conform with this project.
3. Continues CodeIgniter design patterns. Anyone who has used CodeIgniter will quickly understand Kohana’s structure and design patterns.
4. Community, not company, driven. Kohana is driven by community discussion, ideas, and code. Kohana developers are from all around the world, each with their own talents. This allows a rapid and flexible development cycle that can respond to bugs and requests within hours, instead of days or months.
5. GET, POST, COOKIE, and SESSION arrays all work as expected. Kohana does not limit your access to global data, but offers the same filtering and XSS protection that CodeIgniter does.
6. Cascading resources, modules, and inheritance. Controllers, models, libraries, helpers, and views can be loaded from any location within your system, application, or module paths. Configuration options are inherited and can by dynamically overwritten by each application.
7. No namespace conflicts. Class suffixes, like _Controller, are used to prevent namespace conflicts. This allows a User’s controller and Users model to both be loaded at the same time.
8. True auto-loading of classes. This includes libraries, controllers, models, and helpers. This is not pre-loading, but true dynamic loading of classes, as they are requested.
9. Helpers are static classes, not functions. For example, instead of using form_open(), you would use form::open().
10. Library drivers and API consistency. Libraries can use different “drivers” to handle different external APIs transparently. For example, multiple session storage options are available (database, cookie, and native), but the same interface is used for all of them. This allows new drivers to be developed for existing libraries, which keeps the API consistent and transparent.
11. Powerful event handler. Kohana events can by dynamically added to, replaced, or even removed completely. This allows many changes to Kohana execution process, without modification to existing system code.

As you can see, whilst maintaining a certain level of similarity to CodeIgniter, Kohana does offer some advantages (at the same time, some disadvantages). Let’s take a look at a few quick comparisons. Grading scale: Limited < Fair < Good < Excellent. Please note: if a feature is not available in the distributed package, but is available via 3rd party libraries, I will state that in the comparison. If a feature is available both in the distributed package and via 3rd party libraries, only the official one will get assessed.

The Verdict

I had a hard time deciding which of these two I use. In the end, I chose to use both. Why? Because they each have its advantages and disadvantages.

CodeIgniter is great for small to medium sized projects, especially good for legacy servers which have PHP4 installed. The fantastic user guide made coding in CI very efficient.

Kohana is probably better for larger sized projects as well as projects that need more flexible extensions. PHP5 offers better (proper) OOP support as the foundation, plus Kohana’s several better feature implementation make it a strong competitor to its predecessor.

There is no right or wrong for which framework you use, everyone has its own taste. For me, CodeIgniter’s excellent documentation and Kohana’s strict PHP5 + easy to use are the primary reasons to choose them over say, CakePHP and Symfony. That said, CakePHP, Symfony and other frameworks are all excellent choices depending on your taste and experience. On one hand I envy the Ruby community because they obviously have the de facto framework to work with, on another hand, we have more options hey?

Feel free to share your opinion and experiences!