Does anyone has an opinion (pros and cons) about the following frameworks compaired to Fuel?
Some area's of thought: Speed, cache, i18n (internationalization), i10n (localization), rest, documentation, ease of programming, support, community, extensions|plugins|modules|vendors, etc.
Note: compare new versions (namespace ready (php 5.3))
Zend Framework 2 Symfony 2 Kohana 3 Yii Framework
Why this topic? Lots of reasons ... Summarized: To make Fuel better and more complete (i10n, i18n and all the goods from Zend classes)
localization is notated l10n and not i10n
l as it begins with l
n as it ends with n
and 10 in between as there are 10 characters between l and n
Same goes with i18n
And c11n (configuration) and so on... ))
I'm not a PHP guru, but Fuel seems the best for my needs. Keep in the mind that it isn't finished yet! =]
I have tried Kohana and CodeIgnitor so far...
This is most often a very non interesting discussion as some people have very fan-like responses, others have made their choice and stick with it, but those that have done some real work with multiple frameworks rarely speak up.
We try to be for PHP5.3 what CodeIgniter was for PHP4: lightweight, configuration over convention & simplicity in use. Having said that, compared to CI we also wanted to take the next step and build in some more powerfull and complex stuff CI never did (for example Hmvc, ORM, modular seperation).
I think we succeeded quite well in those goals, and that is how you should look at us.
Now compared to the others, I only have limited experience with Kohana 3.0 and Yii 1.0 but I think those are the most comparable in their goals to us. Kohana lacked the docs back when I tried it and didn't feel "right" to me, can't exactly tell you why but I just couldn't get into it. I worked a bit with Yii but that felt overcomplicated in many ways, others may disagree but again I couldn't get into this one.
Zend and Symphony are both a lot heavier and add loads of overhead before you've done anything. They also have some advantages with their size, but the question is if you need that. Zend has been called "more like a collection of classes than a framework" and Symfony2 has some stuff I like as a developer but I don't like in how heavy the system is before I've added anything.
In the end my advice to people is always the same: read the docs, try some stuff and see which feels best to you. While you can learn a lot and a framework can get better once you know it, a very important part is if it feels good to you. Generally you're going to do a lot of work with it and that will go a lot better if you're in tune with the framework you're using.
Fuel does everything I need in the right way, maintains the same philosophies from CI but can do a lot more out of the box. If I'd want to set up a project with CI, I'd have to use about 10+ community contributed libraries just to have it being able to do what Fuel does. Kohana has some smart developers working on the project but does not maintain the same philosophies from CI, which is why I did not make the jump.
Fuel scores a lot of points with oil, migrations, the REST implementation and all of the nice PHP5 gems, but especially with it's friendly developers. Once Fuel gets it's own proper, flexible ORM, there's no stopping it.
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