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Software frameworks have become very popular in the last few years, mainly due to the explosive popularity of Ruby on Rails, making frameworks the new hip thing to use for development and a great buzzword to throw around like its candy.

Personally, I don’t use frameworks for my projects. I find them too constricting and I feel that I lose control over my development process, but thats just me. Some people swear and live by frameworks. Maybe one day I will find one that suits me.

Model-View-Controller (MVC) Architecture

MVC is a software approach that separates application logic from presentation. In practice, it permits your web pages to contain minimal scripting since the presentation is separate from the PHP scripting.

• The Model represents your data structures. Typically your model classes will contain functions that help you retrieve, insert, and update information in your your database.
• The View is the information that is being presented to a user.
• The Controller serves as an intermediary between the Model, the View, and any other resources needed to process the HTTP request and generate a web page.

PHP Frameworks

• CakePHP is a PHP framework that works on the MVC architecture and offers caching, application scaffolding, validation of model data and even a presentation API. One of the most popular PHP frameworks.
  
• CodeIgniter is a PHP framework that also uses the MVC platform, has classes for data access, e-mail, FTP, and XML-RPC. Also, CodeIgniter has an exciting community and thorough documentation to get you started.
  
• The Zend Framework is the self-proclaimed “leading open-source PHP framework.” Services included in the API include Ajax (JSON), search, syndication, web services, and a fully object oriented PHP class library.
  
• Symfony - A feature packed framework, but has a reputation for being server-intensive.
• Prado - A component framework for PHP5 that has similar event based web apps similar to ASP.NET.
• BareBones - a one-file, no-configuration, MVC framework for PHP5.

Source @ SmashingMagazine.com

Derek Sivers, the founder, president, and sole programmer behind CD Baby, wrote a great article about why he switched back to PHP from Rails. I have nothing against Ruby or Rails, but I never found the reason why everyone was so hyped about it. Check out the article below.

“Is there anything Rails can do, that PHP CAN’T do?”

The answer is no.

I threw away 2 years of Rails code, and opened a new empty Subversion respository.

Article:
7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails