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

Introduction

Honest differences are often a healthy sign of progress.

—Mahatma Gandhi

For a long time, PHP was disregarded as a language not serious enough for rich web applications. Everyone knew it was popular and perhaps good for small one-shot projects, but all the praise was reserved for the aristocratic elite of frameworks such as Spring, Ruby on Rails, or Django. Only recently has the situation changed, and it changed dramatically. In 2007, it became clear that PHP has not just one, but three major web application frameworks extending capabilities of this language: Symfony, CakePHP, and Zend Framework. The pace of development was fast and steady. Object-oriented source code written in PHP5 was elegant and maintainable. More and more new projects began using them, and their successful completion made the PHP frameworks even more popular.

Nowadays, the popularity of PHP web development frameworks surpasses all others (the evidence is inside this book), and they have become a leading force in the industry. The aim of this book is to gather as much knowledge about this dynamic force as possible and portray all the features these frameworks provide to our fellow programmers.

WHO SHOULD READ THIS BOOK?

If you are actually looking for a vampire novel, put this book back on the shelf. Immediately. If you are a hard-core Assembler programmer who needs no web interfaces at all, you might not be interested, either. However, if you are involved in some kind of web development, you will probably ...