Posted by kevin bailey on 10/13/06 15:22

Robert wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm new to php - are there any listings of web server frameworks out
> there? I'd like to know which ones have the most use and have proven
> themselves at least somewhat.
>
> I'm looking for something in php that'd give the business logic
> modelling and templating that you'd get, say, from Java servlets +
> Freemarker.
>
> thanks,
> Robb

After having just researched this myself over a couple of days I thought I'd
drop in my 2p worth.

Most frameworks (or templating systems) are a trade off between already
built functionality and flexibility - and are somewhere along the scale of

Mambo (which is great)-> horde -> cake-> tiny but strong -> P4A -> RAW php
and HTML.


There are loads more and I may have not got the order quite correct.

Eventually I settled on using Smarty and also to use the PEAR libraries.

This allows complete control over what is being written plus Smarty
templating works really well.

For example I have a single HTML template for the web application. On each
page I use PHP to generate HTML to display a form or results. All I do is
set the output HTML to a single variable called $content and then display
the template. The main div contains the line {$content} so my content is
displayed in the main div.

To change something on every page I just change something on the template.

And the PEAR libraries are really useful for prevention of the reinventing
of the wheel. For example the Auth library means you can easily carry out
authentication for your web application. Also, the mail_queue library
means that it's easy to put emails you want to send into a DB and have
separate cron run code to actually send them.

This is great for the testing phase.

It takes a few days to get Smarty and PEAR set up and understood but I feel
the effort is well worth it.

Kevin

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