The Boston PHP Meetup Group had a php framework bake-off yesterday that I attended. The following are my initial thoughts on the frameworks presented.
1. CakePHP and Symfony
I've bundled these two together since they seem largely based on the same philosophy: rapid development and deployment of an applications by assembling prebuild code around data models. I think they're pretty interesting and worth looking into especially when you need a rapid prototype of an application. I'll probably focus on Symfony since it seemed slightly more intriguing.
2. CodeIgniter
The description of CodeIgniter given by the presenter was that it's "a framework for web frameworks" and that seemed largely true through his demo. There's a lot more code necessary then for CakePHP and Symphony, but it seems to be a much more flexible framework then them as well. I'm definitely going to be looking into it a lot more to see what I can do with it.
3. Zend Framework
I was not really impressed by the demo of Zend Framework. It seems overly complicated without providing a significant gain in development speed. I doubt I'll look into it any further unless I come across something I need that it really excels at.
In summary:
Based on the demos I saw, I'll be looking into Symfony and CodeIgniter to be my frameworks of choice, Symfony when I need a rapid prototype and CodeIgniter when I need a very customizable base to work from. My caveat to this is that it's just a first impression and may change over time as I explore the functionality of the frameworks.
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