Anyone heard of Kohana?

[Razasharp]

Kohana is a PHP 5 framework that uses the Model View Controller architectural pattern. It aims to be secure, lightweight, and easy to use.

The folk at Gallery seem to love it.

Anyone use it? What do you think? How does it compare to other frameworks you've used?

[simsim]

Initially I thought you were talking about the Kahana.

Well, I think this is awesome. I'm a big fan of CodeIgniter, but its major drawback that really pissed many people off is that it's based on PHP4, and does not fully leverage PHP5's OOP features. Kohana seems to exist to fill in this gap. Since it's based on CodeIgniter, I think picking up with it for someone familiar with CI is even easier.

As to comparison with other frameworks, I don't have a sound knowledge of every framework out there, but it usually boils down to personal preferences. I hear many good things about Symfony, and some high-profile Web companies have used it to build some big applications (e.g. Yahoo, with Yahoo! bookmarks). What I've heared a lot about CodeIgniter is that it's the best framework for someone who is starting to learn OOP and wants to pick up quickly with MVC.

[Dream]

What's a framework again it's not an IDE right?

nevermind

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-view-controller

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_framework

Just a "Simple database abstraction using SQL helpers" would help me greatly with my site... too late to change that though. This is how Kohana handles databases:

http://docs.kohanaphp.com/libraries/database

Maybe I should just learn MySQLi instead, and do some function wrappers for handling queries already made my own "template system". Also the $_REQUEST sanitazion system could be nice:

http://docs.kohanaphp.com/libraries/validation

There don't seem to be Ajax in there, my main problem with Ajax is converting special characters using JavaScript to send to the script and translating them. I had a hard time implementing a solution that was good enough. I'm using YUI for Ajax also, which helps greatly.

Other than that, I'm not sure I would have use for the rest. Relying on code which is not your own is dangerous, as it might not be around a year from now.

[Razasharp]

There are some good tips here Dream: http://dustinweber.com/web-developme...php-framework/

Simsim - I like that CodeIgniter is tied in ExpressionEngine, definitely worth looking into as EE is actually quite neat (seen their gallery system?)

[Dean C]

This doesn't look too different from CakePHP, which is far more established and supported Think I'll be sticking with cake

[Razasharp]

Dean, what type of projects have you used CAKE for?

Also, I heard that is has a larger overhead and thus is slower and not so suited to busy sites - but that was a while ago, I guess it has cleaned up and moved on since then?

Btw, whenever I go on the last site (specifically the forum) in the 'showcase' area on CAKEs site - I get a virus/trojan warning from my antivirus!

[Wayne Luke]

Why wouldn't you just use standard PHP? Do you really need a framework to wrap functions that already exist?

Actually before anyone replies, I know what frameworks provide and why they are used. It was more in reference to:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=302694

[Dean C]

Dean, what type of projects have you used CAKE for?

Also, I heard that is has a larger overhead and thus is slower and not so suited to busy sites - but that was a while ago, I guess it has cleaned up and moved on since then?

Btw, whenever I go on the last site (specifically the forum) in the 'showcase' area on CAKEs site - I get a virus/trojan warning from my antivirus!

I've used Cake on 3 work projects last year, and 2 personal projects. The one site receives a large amount of traffic, and it scales very well. If scalability concerns you, just take a look at some of the sample sites using it under the "Just Baked" heading: http://cakephp.org/ . It's not for everybody, and despite what the frameworks manual will tell you the learning curve is not as simple as the blog tutorial for instance. Understanding how relationships between the models are implemented is one thing, but understanding how to bind and unbind relationships on the fly, which you will need to do for anything useful is not so easy

[Razasharp]

Do you need me to tell you why it's different Wayne?

Cheers Dean, I'm not 100% yet still weighing everything up. I'm sure I'll give it a good go though, lots of people like it.

Despite what Wayne might think ( @ Wayne) I'm hoping the vBCMS will be all that I need, along with Darrens guides/tips to help us get into it nice and easy - but I'm not leaving anything to chance, and learning all I can in the meantime and keeping my options open.

[Razasharp]

Just been reading up on symfony, sounds like a beast!

Dailymotion have just moved over to it. Check out their set-up!

• 50 PHP machines serving about 5000 PHP pages per second
• 17 DB machines
• 30 memcache machines for a total of 210 Gb of memory storage
• 60 Gb/s of bandwidth
• 1.2 petabytes of storage

And that does not account for the machines that encode the videos, host the search engine, ... All in all, they have more than 430 machines!

Would be interesting to know why they choose symfony over other frameworks.. ...well more than what they said here:

Why symfony?

Thanks to the creativity of their marketing department, the Dailymotion developers add new features on a nearly everyday basis. So, rewriting the website from scratch was out of question. They just could not have afforded to stop all new developments, waiting for the new code base to be finished.

They needed a way to migrate step by step from the old code base to the new one, and keep adding new features at the same time. And symfony was the ideal candidate. Why?

First, because the symfony framework is one of the most well-known PHP frameworks, and one used by many high-traffic websites.

Then, the framework is well decoupled, meaning that each component can be used by itself, without the whole framework.

Eventually, the other big selling point of symfony was its flexibility. It is very easy to override the default behaviors or add new ones if needed. And that's exactly what they needed.

[DutchTreat]

This doesn't look too different from CakePHP, which is far more established and supported Think I'll be sticking with cake

If you like bloatware, cake and zend frameworks are great! If you like speed and low overhead, CI is where its at. Linus Torvald even said CI is a better approach than the other 2. You can even use cake/zend modules within CI if you want. CI is less than a meg download...what size are the other 2? Ahem.

[SeeLand]

I don't heard of Kohana

[Dean C]

If you like bloatware, cake and zend frameworks are great! If you like speed and low overhead, CI is where its at. Linus Torvald even said CI is a better approach than the other 2. You can even use cake/zend modules within CI if you want. CI is less than a meg download...what size are the other 2? Ahem.

Since when has code quantity had any bearing whatsoever on quality. And you can easily use Zend modules within Cake too.

[DutchTreat]

Since when has code quantity had any bearing whatsoever on quality. And you can easily use Zend modules within Cake too.

I don't recall mentioning quality. Its just faster and more lightweight because it only includes the basic features a framework needs. The others have many functions, which slow it down and make it more complex to learn. Just a preference, Ive used all 3 for years. I don't always get to pick the framework I work with, but when I do I always go with CI.

[Dean C]

I don't recall mentioning quality. Its just faster and more lightweight because it only includes the basic features a framework needs. The others have many functions, which slow it down and make it more complex to learn. Just a preference, Ive used all 3 for years. I don't always get to pick the framework I work with, but when I do I always go with CI.

You did directly imply that cakePHP was bloatware because of it's download size. In fact CakePHP's latest version weighs in at only 658 KB. Whilst I'm not arguing your preference, I'm arguing your suggestion that it's bloatware. I find it to be extremely lightweight and does exactly what I need very efficiently. I haven't had any performance issues running on any of the sites that I've built using it.