The PHP programming language allows you to develop websites and web applications as well as SaaS of varying complexity. To make development faster and better, there are special frameworks that provide many ready-to-use features. Over the past years, the programming community has created many excellent PHP frameworks, with the help of which you can easily develop SaaS projects of different types and complexity.
Laravel
Laravel is the most popular PHP framework because of its superior architecture. The framework is a development environment for both small and large-scale web applications. Many web developers give preference to this particular framework.
Laravel’s main features:
- Excellent documentation
- A powerful ecosystem built by developers: lots of forums, courses, tutorials, sponsors
- Flexible routing system
- Syntax sugar and a lot of helper helpers
- Easy-to-use logging system
- Built-in authentication, authorization, registration
- Flexible caching system
- Drivers for sending email notifications
- Mass of ready packages on Github
- Migrations and ORM
- Built-in templating blade
These are not all the advantages of the Laravel framework. It’s the leader among all other frameworks.
Lumen
Lumen is a micro-framework based on Laravel. It usually happens that when a framework becomes popular, other, lighter frameworks emerge based on it. For example, Kohana was created based on Codeigniter. A similar thing happened with Lumen. In many ways, it inherited functionality from Laravel, but only the most basic parts. The rest have been removed, as it is a micro-framework, and hence it has to be lightweight.
The main features of Lumen:
- Simplified routing.
- Good performance compared to Laravel
- Best suited for building microservices
- Plenty of pre-built packages to install
Cake PHP
Cake PHP is a simple framework with an MVC structure and CRUD for fast web application development. It is based on ideas from the Ruby on Rails framework, for the Ruby language.
The main features of the Cake PHP framework:
- Simple source code and clear documentation
- CRUD for faster development
- Numerous built-in components
- Protection against CSRF attacks and SQL injection
Phalcon
Phalcon is a full-stack framework in the form of a C extension and converted for PHP compatibility. According to the authors of the framework, it is one of the fastest PHP frameworks.
The main features of Phalcon are:
- Fast processing time and high performance
- Built-in template engine
- Caching system
- Form Builder
- ORM
Symfony
Symfony is a powerful framework based on unrelated components that you can plug and reuse independently. Symfony was the inspiration for the Laravel framework mentioned above. Symfony has served as the basis for CMSs such as Magento, Drupal, and Opencart. However, it is much harder to learn and use than Laravel and is only suitable for programmers with a lot of experience.
The main features of the framework Symfony:
- Allows you to install a bunch of third-party packages, libraries, components
- Tight integration with Doctrine
- Built-in Swift Mailer library for sending emails
- Flexible error logging system, including Monolog
- Great documentation with examples
- Suitable for complex and demanding web projects
Conclusion
The choice of framework always depends on the type of SaaS project you are going to develop.
Laravel is currently the most popular and widely used PHP framework. It can be used to develop small and large web applications.
Lumen is suitable for developing microservices and small components that you might use as part of other, larger information systems.
Cake PHP is worth taking if you are planning to develop a small website that is not resource-hungry.
Phalcon is suitable for projects where the speed and responsiveness of the web application and its overall performance are crucial.
Symfony and Zend Framework are best suited for large commercial projects where development time is long, and security and code quality requirements for PHP development company are high.
PHP frameworks are indispensable for developing websites and services of any complexity. By using frameworks you can significantly speed up the development process and make a quality web application.
