On the heels of Ruby on Rails comes an array of MVC frameworks developed in PHP. WASP, Symfony, and Prado all look promising. The real challenge with any PHP framework is going to be building the scaffolding automation onto a proven MVC framework.
Symfony seems to be the most robust of these, but perhaps too complex for most basic web apps. Built around Mojavi, it is a fully robust framework. It’s main challenge will be in providing an easy to use scaffolding functionality that allows the developer to easily customize the resulting code.
WASP and Prado both are young and are developing the scaffolding alongside the core framework code. They could both evolve into strong frameworks.
Naturally, we at Pelago have found that there is no one-size-fits all framework. In the process of rolling our own framework, we’ve adapted the features we need from a variety of pre-existing frameworks. My guess is this will be the case for most web development shops building an app that goes beyond the basic app. I’m not saying that basic apps are bad, but i’m noticing a niche developing in the web app world. There are apps that do too much, which this new framework movement is rebelling against, and there are apps that do too little, which is all too often the aim of these new frameworks.
The success of these new frameworks will depend on providing a seamless setup experience for the basic web developer, while also allowing the more advanced web developer to customize and tweak the code to their needs.
