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

Chapter 4. Your First Application in the Three Frameworks

— Your mother ate my dog!

— Not all of it.

—Braindead

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Designing an address book application.

• Implementing in Symfony, CakePHP, and Zend Framework.

This chapter will take you through the process of designing and developing your first application: an online address book. This application will be built on top of a simple database, used for storing information about your contacts. Each entry consists of a few fields (first name, last name, address, phone number, e-mail address), and the basic functionality is to perform all create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations for each database entry.

Because this is your first step of developing applications using frameworks, we want it to be as simple as possible, introducing you to benefits offered by presented frameworks. This chapter should show how with little or no effort, you can achieve great results, all thanks to the frameworks' basic functionality.

DESIGN

At this point we assume that you have done the all steps from the previous chapters and you have your frameworks up and running. Before you can continue, you need to make sure that your server is running (Apache, for example), a database connection is configured, and a framework is installed and configured accordingly.

Project Requirements

When working on a project, it is good to have some expectations defined before any coding is done. A properly planned project greatly enhances workflow and helps you ...