Comparison of PHP frameworks Phalcon, Nette and Zend

Wide usage of the PHP language across web developers and its good availability results in existence of many projects built on it. Unfortunately, due to the growth of PHP popularity more requirements are imposed on it. Not all of them tend to be related directly to the language itself but they can be affected by the external conditions (like e.g. Internet evolution, etc.). Special libraries (also known as frameworks) are response to existence of permanently repetitive tasks and growing complexity of problems being solved not only in the context of web development. There are three PHP framework representatives compared in this paper (Zend Framework 2.3, Nette 2.1.2 and Phalcon 1.3.1). In the first section, some fundamental terms are declared as well as some inherent limitations of the PHP language itself. Further, various comparison criterions are introduced together with additional research questions which are more or less answered in the main section. The second theoretical-practical section analyses the frameworks in the context of the defined problem domains. The main purpose of the application programming interface review together with included code snippets is to describe possible differences in approaches applied for some specific problems. Additionally, some options for measuring framework popularity mentioned in earlier section are used, too. In the end, frameworks are not evaluated either in positive or negative way. The final evaluation remains on the actual reader. The main focus is to provide basic insight into all three frameworks and possibly to (de)motivate to deeper exploration any of them. Also, as matter of secondary objectives some axiomatic assumptions are validated (like speed and popularity of the frameworks).