Published on Jun 6, 2016
Updated on Oct 16, 2019
Developing Web applications can be a time intensive and complicated process as it involves delivering unique user experiences over browsers and smartphones. However, it can be streamlined by using PHP framework to create simple and rapid agile applications. This is usually doable due to the reuse of generic modules or components, and the convenience that comes with a unified structural foundation.
A PHP framework also helps to achieve application scalability and simplify maintenance, ensuring compliance with the most important development standards.
Other than that, to achieve economies of scale, your top most priority must be to develop high quality apps with optimal use of resources. PHP frameworks helps you to concentrate on those specific tasks that result in the creation of sustainable and flawless code. But the question lies which framework should you use to create your web apps?
For one of our clients, we did a POC on some of the widely used frameworks of PHP, to see which framework is best recommended for the e-commerce business solution.
We have taken the top two most widely used members of PHP framework family – Laravel 5 and Zend 2.0, and tried to evaluate how they stack up against each other and which one is best to use.
The five questions which were answered during POC of the two frameworks are:
1. Do we have high performance template engine support present?
2. SQL injection attacks and cross-site scripting (XSS) prevention?
3. Cookie Information management?
4. Caching system that loads your web applications extremely fast?
5. Authentication support that is facilitated via RBAC (Role Based Access Control)?
For our client we did a small exercise and answered above 5 questions.
| Zend | Laravel |
|---|---|
| Zend Framework, which provides a number of ready-to-use components to improve your application’s security. | It uses a blade template engine to speed up compiling tasks, and users can include latest features so easily. Laravel has its own light-weight templating engine called “Blade”. |
| Zend Framework offers an Escaper component to escape output and defend from XSS and may be vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. | Client-side cross-site scripting protection (xss) is there, Laravel’s {{}} syntax will automatically escape any HTML entities passed along via a view variable. Laravel’s Eloquent ORM uses PDO parameter binding to avoid SQL injection. Parameter binding ensures that malicious users can’t pass in query data which could modify the query’s intent. |
| Has a built in authentication support that is facilitated via RBAC (Role Based Access Control). | RBAC is present here |
| We can add Caching system that loads your web applications extremely fast | Caching system that loads your web applications extremely fast is present by default. |
| We can do Cookie Information management in Zend | All cookies created by the Laravel framework are encrypted and signed with an authentication code |
Adding to the comparison that is in table-1, we evaluated some more points in Laravel vs Zend 2.0.:
COMPARISON TABLE
| Features | Laravel | Zend |
|---|---|---|
| Memory Recommended | 1 Gb | 512 Mb |
| Template Language | Accounts for Blade in Addition to Php, Smarty and Twig | Does not account for Blade in addition to Php, Smarty and Twig |
| Development Principles | Test-driven development, No repetition, Configuration over convention | Configuration over convention |
| Released Version | 5.0 | 2.0 |
| Programming Paradigm | Functional, Event Driven, Object Orientated | Event Driven, Object Orientated |
| Scripting Language Support | Php & Amp; Javascript | Php |
| Front End | Php | Php & Javascript |
| Client/Server Code Reuse | Model View Controller, Template Language, Web Services | Model View Controller |
| Data Storage | Berkeley Db, Relational Db, File System | Relational Db, File System |
| Library File Size | 17Mb | 8Mb |
| Api Comprehensibility | 5 star | 3 star |
| Implementation Flexibility | 55% | 45% |
| Community Feedback | 5 Star | 4 Star |
| Ease of Use | 5 Star | 3 Star |
| Uncompressed Size | 2Mb | 9Mb |
| Maven Support | No | Yes |
| Resource File Processing | Yes | No |
| Partial Classes | Yes | No |
| Javascript Library included | No | Yes |
| Requests Per Second | 100 | 1000 |
| Modules/Extensions/Plug-Ins | 8000 | 9999 |
| Easy to Configure | Yes | No |
| Xss | Yes | No |
| Cloud Platform Support | Google App Engine, Amazon Ec2, Fortrabbit, Pagoda Box, Digital Ocean, Heroku, Linode, Openshift | Windows Azure, Amazon Ec2, Heroku, Openshift |
| Email Protocol | Smtp, Imap, Pop3, Mailgun, Mandrill | Imap, Pop3, Smtp |
| Design Pattern | Active-Record, Model-View-Controller, Dependency Injection, Observer, Singleton, Facade, Event-Driven, Mtv | Dependency Injection, Model-View-Controller, Event-Driven, Data Mapper, Singleton, Active-Record |
| Database | Sqlite, Mysql, Postgresql, Redis, Microsoft Bi | Microsoft Bi, Mysql, Postgresql, Mariadb, Sqlite, Ibm Db2, Oracle, Mongodb |
Considering the success criteria like raboust/stability/scalability/security etc. in top 2 tables, it is clear that Laravel stands better than Zend.
In case, you any queries on Laravel vs Zend, feel free to approach us on hello@mantralabsglobal.com, our developers are here to clear confusions and it might be a good choice based on your business and technical needs.
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