Why I think FuelPHP will be the new PHP’s framework leader | Hacker News Reader

Why I think FuelPHP will be the new PHP’s framework leader

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9 pointsjaequery9 comments

I worry that PHP's problem is that all these various frameworks are fragmenting developers, while Ruby on Rails is like a single beacon for Ruby devs.

I've just spent ten minutes going through the docs and I can't see anything that improves on what Yii has exactly the same functions for at least the last five months. That's not a criticism BTW, but I can't see any reason why FuelPHP would suddenly be a framework leader.

Compare the docs contents:

Fuel: http://fuelphp.com/docs/general/tasks.html

Yii: http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/guide/1.1/en/basics.mvc

I agree. From reading the docs, and also having my head in several frameworks (including one I've developed) for over five years, Fuel really doesn't seem to bring a whole lot more to the table than is already there.

While it may turn out to be a grand success (and I truly hope it is), I think PHP is, as you mentioned, much too fragmented to have an end-all-be-all framework of choice. Another successful framework will not unite PHP as much as add more fragmentation. This isn't necessarily bad (having more choices is fine), but a "one framework to rule them all" attitude seems a bit far-fetched (not that Fuel has this attitude, more the author).

Not sure why this is on the front page.

I will bash Zend Framework. I will push fuelPHP citing only 2 redeeming features (Clean OOP implementation and decent Docs). I will then discard Symfony2 because of personal preference...

If anything Symfony2 is in a good position. There is already a strong job market for the framework. If I was a ZF developer looking to move I wouldn't jump into FuelPHP. I would go where there are already plenty of jobs.

Poor article. The author only compares FuelPHP to the Zend Framework and bases the whole decision on why it is better with documentation.

Looks inspired by Rails. However, if you like the approach of Rails, why not just use Rails? It's similar to people who put the OSX skin on their Windows machines. If you like the OSX look, use OSX.

PS: I get there are many reasons to use PHP over Ruby, just as there are many reasons to use Windows over OSX. I'm just making a point by going to the extreme.

For a long time I experimented with PHP frameworks to see if I could capture the rails magic, but so much of it has nothing to do with the code/API itself (and more to do with the culture and community around the technologies). I'm now a full-time rails dev and hope that I will never have to use PHP again.

i do rails and php and frequently switching between the two made me write halfmoon (https://github.com/jcs/halfmoon). it's basically a tiny framework for php that has a syntax like rails (where php allows it - php 5.4's new short array syntax should clean things up quite a bit once it comes out). it uses an existing php port of activerecord (http://phpactiverecord.org) so all of the finders, associations, and validations work much the same.

as you can see by the code, it doesn't aspire to be a full port of rails, but it does routing, controllers, models, and views similarly enough. it's probably closest to the syntax of rails 2.2.

i use it in production for a handful of low-traffic sites (http://hntrades.com, http://4m.blandroid.org, http://domainical.org) and mostly hack on it when i'm working on a project and need a new feature or find a bug. it doesn't have any community or documentation outside of the README, but the project works well enough to keep me sane when i'm writing php.

I'm genuinely interested in your reason for not just using rails full-time. Is it because of the perceived deployment difficulty?

sometimes the project needs to use existing php libraries or code, sometimes it needs to be portable and php is easier to host and maintain, and sometimes i just don't want to deal with setting up and maintaining another rails site.

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