Hello again, we started the last semester for the Web Development program last week. In this semester we have to create our final web project using any framework. Since I liked to create my project using PHP, I had to make my decision to choose one of the many available PHP frameworks. Last week I spent too much time in researching for the most appropriate one to start developing the project.

I found that the most commonly used PHP frameworks are: Laravel, CodeIgniter (CI) and Zend.  Laravel, the brand new framework, has started to move quickly and there is no doubt that it will become the most commonly used especially for freelancers if it did not become already. Zend is used by many organizations and it’s for large corporations. When I used indeed website for job searching I found that there are many jobs posting requesting Zend, but this framework has a steep curve learning compared with the lightweight frameworks like CodeIgniter or Laravel. For sure, having the skills of using more than one framework is not a bad idea as job requirements can differ from one company to another. Personally, I chose CodeIgniter for the time being to build my PHP project, since CI has been in the market for a while, it has a very good documentation, community

Personally, I chose CodeIgniter for the time being to build my PHP project, since CI has been in the market for a while, it has a very good documentation, community’s support, and online tutorials. These will be very helpful for someone who is using a framework for the first time and needs to create a web project in a short time. After mastering CodeIgniter, Laravel will be definitely my next framework to work with.

After mastering CodeIgniter, Laravel will be definitely my next framework to work with. Although CodeIgniter and Zend had the highest number of users, Laravel is growing really fast, for more details you can use google trends search as shown in the image below:

Whatever framework we like or want to use, we need to have a good knowledge in Object Oriented Programming. Although PHP as a server-side scripting language is not considered to be a strongly or a truly object-oriented language like Java or C#, it started to have a great support and functionality for this programming concept since version 5.