Looking back on the release of PHP 5 and its support to OOP programming, we can see the enormous positive impact it had on the PHP ecosystem. A large number of frameworks and libraries have sprawled out, offering enterprise level solutions to web application development.
The release of PHP 7 is likely to be another leap forward for the PHP ecosystem. Though none of the new features are revolutionary as such, as they can be found in other programming languages from years ago, they impact PHP greatly. We are yet to see how its new features will reshape existing and future frameworks and the way we write applications.
The introduction of more advanced errors to exceptions handling, scalar type hints, and function return type hints will surely bring much awaited stability to applications and frameworks using them. The speed improvements compared to PHP 5.6 are significant enough to cut down the hosting costs for higher load sites. Thankfully, the PHP development team minimized backward incomparability changes, so they should not stand in the way of swift PHP 7 adoption.
Choosing the right framework is all but an easy task. What classifies a framework as an enterprise class framework is more than just collection of classes. It has an entire ecosystem around it.
One should never be driven by hype when evaluating a framework for a project. Questions like the following should be taken into consideration:
Is it company or community driven?
Does it provide quality documentation?
Does it have a stable and frequent release cycle?
Does it provide some official form of certification?
Does it provide free and commercial support?
Does it have occasional seminars we can attend?
Is it open towards community involvement, so we can submit functionalities and patches?
Is it a full-stack or glue type of framework?
Is it convention or configuration driven?
Does it provide enough libraries to get you started (security, validation, templating, database abstractions, ORMs, routing, internationalization, and so on)?
Can the core framework be extended and overridden enough to make it more future proof with possible changes?
There are a number of established PHP frameworks and libraries out there, so the choice is all but easy. Most of these frameworks and libraries are still to fully catch up with the latest features added in PHP 7.
Moving forward, in the next chapter, we will look into common design patterns and how to integrate them in PHP.