PHP has been loved by the majority of programming enthusiasts since its birth. It has become a good helper for small and medium-sized webmasters and has trained a large number of PHP programmers. However, as the application of PHP becomes more and more widespread, it is often not limited to the application of small and medium-sized websites. Some large-scale PHP projects are also common.
When we choose PHP to develop large-scale projects, we have to consider issues such as development efficiency, development specifications, and post-maintenance. At this time, everyone often chooses a development framework that is recognized by people, such as the currently popular Zend Framework, Yii, Symfony, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, etc. all claim to have the ability to develop large-scale applications.
New frameworks are emerging one after another, but when we actually apply these frameworks to implement products, there will always be various problems:
1. There are often profound structural theories behind large-scale frameworks. The most familiar ones are familiar theoretical terms such as MVC and ORM, and there is also a lot of in-depth object-oriented knowledge. However, there are only a few people who really understand these, which makes The application threshold has risen sharply; in addition, the application details in large frameworks are even more complicated, and the learning cost is relatively high. This has become particularly embarrassing for PHP, which was originally targeted at small and medium-sized applications.
2. As a scripting language, PHP often runs based on the host process (such as apache, php-fpm). It goes through process creation, environment initialization, script compilation, running engine, output, resource recycling, etc. on a single request. A series of processes such as process destruction are 2-3 orders of magnitude slower than compiled languages in terms of comprehensive operating efficiency at the programming language level, and consume a large amount of system resources. On this basis, we also need to build and load complex development frameworks. It also increases its operating costs. There is no shortage of special needs in large-scale applications. Sometimes the operating efficiency of PHP's large-scale framework is fatal.
3. There are too many factors to consider in large-scale frameworks, and developers need to pay extra attention to too many details other than code when applying, such as: non-standard conventions, lengthy manuals, trivial configurations, complex file directory structures, and difficult-to-limit reasonable Sexual constraints, various class libraries, etc. have made the development process of most programmers confusing, and improving development efficiency has become empty talk.
4. The most fatal point is that the framework author is constantly looking for silver bullets, trying to create a monster that meets all needs. Large-scale applications have high requirements for loose coupling of the system. It is usually impossible to directly operate data at the development level. See a simple SOA model (attached). The data layer and business layer are almost physically isolated, and in the business layer In terms of development, only the service interface provided by the data layer is accessed. Judging from the current PHP development framework (especially the MVC model), ORM is usually used to directly abstract database tables and directly perform CRUD operations. Reliable large-scale applications will not do this (maybe suitable for VPS, but large-scale The application will select VPS??).
In summary, PHP large-scale framework is really still in an embarrassing position, but on the other hand, a good PHP large-scale framework is really a good example worth learning from many people, which contains a lot of design concepts, design patterns, Code optimization, language features, software engineering and other knowledge systems integrate the essence of PHP but far exceed PHP itself.
Finally, I have to say a popular saying about these large PHP frameworks, "Those who learn will live, those who use them will die."
Excerpted from: Red Eye Technology Blog
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