Chances are, even if you are very new to PHP, you’ve stumbled across at least a few PHP frameworks already. Symfony, Zend, Laravel, Yii, and CakePHP are just a few of the popular choices you have available to you.
When I first started developing with PHP back in 1999, there weren’t any of these choices available. Back then, PHP applications were a jumble of logic, HTML, JavaScript, SQL queries, and more scattered across sometimes hundreds and thousands of files. Fast-forward a few years and a number of PHP frameworks started to take shape by 2005-2006, some of which are still around and thriving today ...