Which one is the BEST framework? Well! There are many ways to benchmarking a framework, speed, adoption, usability and so on. Today, I want to examine the plugin community for these frameworks.
I’ve pulled a list from http://hybridauth.sourceforge.net/plugins.html and https://github.com/opauth/opauth/wiki and I plan to review frameworks that are on both URLs, the reason being, is that I don’t believe it makes sense to code authentication systems anymore. It’s been done a trillion times before, why are we reinventing the wheel? If the framework isn’t listed on these two URLs, I’ll prematurely conclude that the community isn’t active enough to put them on the map.
The frameworks that show up on both URLs is as follows:
- CakePHP
- CodeIgniter
- Laravel
- Symfony
- Yii
- Zend
Here are the URLs I’m using to compare the plugin / extension libraries of each framework:
- CakePHP – http://plugins.cakephp.org/
- (656 Packages) (274 updated in 2014)
- CodeIgniter – http://getsparks.org/
- (200 sparks) (5 updated in 2014)
- Laravel – http://packalyst.com/
- (2,431 packages) (1,546 packages found in parse) (1,107 updated in 2014)
- Symfony – http://knpbundles.com/
- (2,413 bundles) (2,143 updated in 2014)
- Yii – http://www.yiiframework.com/extensions/
- (1,678 extensions) (380 updated in 2014)
- Zend – http://modules.zendframework.com/
- (470 modules) (470 udpated in 2014)
Not meant to draw any real conclusions, but it does give an idea of how active the community is, and sheer amount pre-coded stuff out there. I’ve basically went through each site, and scrapped the urls, the followed the urls and parsed the resulting HTML for the date which the extension was updated. I haven’t prod any further than that, although at this point, I am hopeful that if I was on either the Symfony or the Laravel platform, I can look forward to a lot of pre-written code.