Building PHP Applications with Symfony™, CakePHP, and Zend® Framework

Chapter 1. Introducing Symfony, CakePHP, and Zend Framework

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

—Victor Hugo

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• General discussion on frameworks.

• Introducing popular PHP frameworks.

• Design patterns.

Everyone knows that all web applications have some things in common. They have users who can register, log in, and interact. Interaction is carried out mostly through validated and secured forms, and results are stored in various databases. The databases are then searched, data is processed, and data is presented back to the user, often according to his locale. If only you could extract these patterns as some kind of abstractions and transport them into further applications, the development process would be much faster.

This task obviously can be done. Moreover, it can be done in many different ways and in almost any programming language. That's why there are so many brilliant solutions that make web development faster and easier. In this book, we present three of them: Symfony, CakePHP, and Zend Framework. They do not only push the development process to the extremes in terms of rapidity but also provide massive amounts of advanced features that have become a must in the world of Web 2.0 applications.

WHAT ARE WEB APPLICATION FRAMEWORKS AND HOW ARE THEY USED?

A web application framework is a bunch of source code organized into a certain architecture that can be used for rapid development of web applications. You can think of frameworks ...