PHP Frameworks

Several open-source communities offer PHP frameworks, which provide inline features for developing PHP-based applications. Developers have the option to use frameworks as they are not mandatory components. However, without the framework, the vanilla approach of developing PHP includes lots of overheads of managing the software features, functionalities, and security features that require more developer resources and increases the cost of development. Some widely used PHP frameworks are Laravel, CodeIgniter, Symfony, CakePHP, FuelPHP, Phalcon, Slim, and Zend Framework. In addition, the PHP framework provides some valuable features that help to streamline the development process of the PHP applications that should be included in the application architecture.

Top List of PHP Frameworks (Features)

Below is the list of best PHP frameworks based on popularity and the ability to facilitate application development.

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1. Laravel

It’s an open-source framework following the model-view-controller-based architecture.

Various features provided by it are:

• The composer has been available since Laravel 4 has come, and it acts as a dependency manager to add framework-agnostic.
• Eloquent ORM, i.e., an active record pattern implementation.
• Query Builder provides a set of classes.
• Laravel inspires extremely clean and readable code, thereby keeping the life of developers easy.
• Laravel offers robust web application security, incorporating password hashing, encryption, email verification, and API authentication.
• Laravel ensures protected and safe routing by defining all routes in the routes directory, and the framework automatically downloads these files.
• To prevent cross-site forgery, the system appends a CSRF token to URLs.
• The framework offers features like Blade (templating engine) template, localization, Javascript, and CSS Scaffolding in the front end.
• Supports Redis (key-value store), pagination, migrations (sharing the database schema), database seeding,

Server Requirements before working with Laravel:

Using Laravel Homestead virtual machine is the best choice, and we highly recommend using it as our local Laravel development environment.

If you are not using Homestead, then the following are required:

• PHP >= 7.1.3
• OpenSSL PHP Extension
• PDO PHP Extension
• Mbstring PHP Extension
• Tokenizer PHP Extension
• XML PHP Extension
• Ctype PHP Extension
• JSON PHP Extension
• BCMath PHP Extension

Installing Laravel:

Laravel utilizes composer to manage its dependencies, so the prime requirement is that the composer be preinstalled. Then download the Laravel installer using composer as given below.

Composer Global requires Laravel/installer.

• Creating a project via composer

Composer create-project – prefer-dist Laravel/Laravel blog

• Local Development Server

2. CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter is an open-source development framework.

The following are the features provided by it:

• It doesn’t require rigorous Model-view-controller implementation; the controller is mandatory, and the model and view are optional.
• Helper functions are there, like URL Helpers that assist with link creation, Form Helpers are there, Text Helpers are there to format text, and Cookie Helpers are there to set and read cookies.
• You can create new libraries and replace and remove native libraries.
• The hooks feature provides a means to tap into and modify the inner workings of the framework without hacking the core files.
• The auto-load feature allows the automatic initialization of libraries, helpers, and models every time the system runs.
• CodeIgniter provides a page caching feature, thereby enhancing performance.
• CodeIgniter includes an error logging class that saves errors and debugs messages as text files.
• URI routing is there; the URL string is uniquely mapped to the controller.
• Password hashing is there for PHP version > 5.5.
• In the database part, various provided features are QueryBuilder, QueryCaching, Transactions, etc.
• You can set environment variables to determine where the application should run, either in the development environment or in production.

How to Install CodeIgniter?

• Download CodeIgniter.
• Unzip the package.
• Upload the CodeIgniter folders and files to your server. Usually, the index.php file will be at your root.
• Open the application/config/config.php file with a text editor and set your base URL; if you intend to use encryption or sessions, set your encryption key.
• If you intend to use a database, open the application/config/database.php file with a text editor and set your database settings.

3. Symfony

Symfony is open-source software; Symfony components are a set of decoupled and reusable PHP libraries. It aims to develop robust enterprise applications and gives developers full control over the configuration from directories to foreign libraries and can be customized.

Symfony is incorporated with the following features”:

• Localized routing (i18n) is provided; By localizing the routes, it becomes possible to offer unique paths per locale. Symfony allows writing these routes without duplication and also supports wildcards.
• Twig templates are there; they are simple and don’t process the PHP tags; twig can do automatic HTML escaping, manual contextual output escaping, and some filters.
• Twig template caching speeds up the process by compiling templates into native PHP classes and caching them.
• The asset component is there for URL generation and versioning of CSS, JS, and images.
• The browserKit component is there to simulate the behavior of a web browser, allowing one to make requests, click on links, and submit forms programmatically.
• A dependency injection component implements a PSR-11 compatible service container that allows standardization and centralization of objects in the application.
• DOMCrawler component is there to ease the DOM navigation for HTML and XML documents.
• The Dotenv component is there to make environment variables stored in .env variables.
• The event dispatcher is there so that component can communicate via event dispatch and listen to them.
• LDAP component is already present to communicate with the LDAP server.
• The ExpressionLanguage component provides an engine that can compile and evaluate expressions.
• Polyfill/APCu component provides apcu_* functions and the ACPUIterator class to users of legacy APC extension.
• The Serializer component is there to turn objects into formats like JSON, XML, or YAML.

Installation Steps:

Use the following steps for downloads; The system should preinstall the composer.

Composer requires symphony/asset:

For the download of individual components as mentioned above, please visit: https://symfony.com/components

4. CakePHP

CakePHP is an open-source platform that makes building web applications simple and faster and requires less code.

CakePHP comes with the following features:

• It provides scaffolding to build prototypes rapidly.
• A cache class in the CakePHP supports the caching and provides the static interface and uniform API to interact with various caching implementations.
• The hash class provides static utilities that make proper array management, thereby making code optimized.
• The Inflector class manipulates the provided string and handles word variations, including pluralization and capitalization.
• Logging is easy in CakePHP; the LogTrait provides the log() function.
• The fastest way to get up and running with REST is to add a few lines to set up resource routes in the config/routes.php.
• The validation package in CakePHP provides features to build validators that can validate arbitrary arrays of data with ease.
• Various plug-ins are supported for use in conjunction with CakePHP, and they are Chronos (which provides a zero-dependency collection of extensions to the DateTime object), DebugKit (has a debugging toolbar and enhanced debugging tools), ElasticSearch (which provides an ORM-like abstraction on top of elasticsearch, makes testing and indexing of documents easy).
• Phinx and CakePHP phinx allows developers to alter and manipulate databases clearly. No need to handwrite SQL; instead, phinx provides robust APIs for creating migrations using PHP code.
• A Bake console is provided to run CakePHP faster; the Bake console can create models, views, behaviors, test cases, fixtures, and plugins.

Phinx can be simply installed by:

php composer. phar requires robmorgan/phinx

Middleware support is there so that we can wrap our application into reusable and composable layers of request handling or response building.

Installation and Pre-requisites:

Below are the prerequisites that need to be satisfied before starting the installation:

• HTTP Server ( Apache, Nginx, or Microsoft IIS).
• PHP 7.3.
• mbstring PHP extension
• intl PHP extension ( if using XAMPP, intl extension shall be included, but make sure to uncomment extension = php_intl.dll in Php.ini and restart the XAMPP server through the control panel, in case you are using WAMP; By default, the intl extension is activated. To enable it, you must go to the folder and copy all files with names similar to icu*.dll. Afterward, paste these files into the Apache bin directory. Finally, restart the services.
• SimpleXML PHP extension.
• PDO PHP extension.

You need to install one of the databases from the given list on your machine:

• MySQL ( v5.5.3 or greater )
• MariaDB (v 5.5 or greater)
• PostgreSQL
• SQLite3
• Microsoft SQL server ( >= version 2008)

5. FuelPHP

FuelPHP is an open-source framework, fast and compatible with PHP 5.4+ versions.

We have included the following features:

• It is a model-view-viewmodel (MVVM) type of framework that limits itself to the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern and follows the model-view-viewmodel (MVVM) approach. View models are an alternative term for presentation models.
• FuelPHP supports a router-based approach allowing us to write the URI directly.
• Supports the CSRF tokens to prevent cross-site scripting forgery.
• Input filtering and query builder helps in SQL injection.
• We support the authentication framework to ensure secure authentication.
• FuelPHP provides a CLI called “oil,” designed to speed up the development, testing assistance, and debugging. It also helps to run database migrations.
• Developers can have a flying start by utilizing the base classes provided for controllers and models. Such features are – Controller_Template ( add simple page templating functionality to the controllers), Controller_Rest ( way for RESTful API creation), Controller_Hybrid (combine two features into a single controller), Model_crud (provides all methods for CRUD operations in a single table).
• Lightweight ORM provides an object-oriented way of working with database data and performing CRUD; relationships like has-many and many-many are there, cascading saves and deletes for related objects. In addition, observers are there to update object instances.
• Security incorporates Auth framework, has integrated the Opauth library, and provides various other features like Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), secure hashing function for passwords, and OAuth integration for social media authentication.
• There are template parsers for enhancing views from simple PHP; numerous libraries are there for it:
  1. Mustache
  2. Twig
  3. Haml
  4. Jade
  5. Daewoo
  6. Smarty
  7. Markdown

Installation Steps:

Follow the given steps for the same:

• $ curl https://get.fuelphp.com/oil | sh

To create the project, you can follow these steps:

• $ oil create
• $ composer create-project fuel/fuel –prefer-dist

Conclusion

In the above documentation, we cited multiple PHP Frameworks for carrying multiple code development features. Before picking any of those, it is essential to discuss the requirements and design patterns that should be followed. The frameworks had diversity and provided various plug-ins for making logging and metrics tracing to be there. The framework named Lumen by Laravel is highly appreciated while looking for microservices development, as microservices architecture differs from monolithic applications. The logging mechanisms, database handling, Auth security, and implementation are of prime concern before coding. When you choose a framework, you need to consider the specific domain for which the application is intended. This includes areas such as banking and financial services, supply chain management, life sciences, retail, and social networking.

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