Prado PHP framework is still alive Prado PHP
During a recent project, I started to deal with the Prado framework. Prado borrowed many ideas from Microsoft ASP.NET. This framework has in mind since June 2004, but from version 3.0, significant efforts are allocated to ensure the quality and stability of Prado. After trying most of available frameworks (Symfony, CakePHP, Zend), I felt that something else would be needed, something like ASP.NET. The key strength is its large number of components.
As for me, Prado is the most comfortable PHP framework that I’ve ever tried. This is not because it’s long been developing in ASP.NET and now I started to get to know someone else. On the contrary, I develop in PHP for 7 years, but a few years ago I began to fond of component based frameworks, and where web development is concerned, the event driven programming is more logical to me than strict MVC. It takes time to understand, but once you understand it, this will help in rapid development. The only annoying thing is that there is no IDE support for Prado templating (except something for Dreamweaver MX, but I’d rather relegate it). Well, you can expect a few blog posts about Prado tricks… :)
Contrary to popular belief, Prado is still under development. PRADO 4 is going to be a major rewrite of almost the whole framework (mostly backwards compatible to PRADO 3). The whole PRADO 4 core has been rewritten from scratch. Details:
- new template parser which is based upon the DOM extension of PHP. First benchmarks:
- 749.87 requests per second (1.334ms per request) with several components in page and layout
- Without layout: 856.37rps (1.168ms).
- Yii’s “Hello World” demo results in 733.42 requests per second (about 1.363ms). A comparable PRADO “Hello World” test without template engine which results in 1600.41 requests per second (0.625ms).
- new ActiveRecord implementation which has been backported from Yii, but is likely to undergo a major rewrite as well
- dictionary based autoloading
- pluggable JavaScript frameworks, so the developer can decide whether he wants to work with Prototype, jQuery, ExtJs or others. New JavaScript frameworks can be added later through a simple plugin mechanism.
- ExtControls which provide PHP based ExtControls with fully automatic JavaScript code generation, optimization and caching.
