How does Symfony rank compared to other frameworks?
Saturday, May 16th, 2009[Update: I've re-written this post to take into account the information that Javier Eguiluz posted in the comments.]
[Update: Jacob Coby points me to Google Trends, which offers the visuals for the numbers that I quote below.]
TIOBE only tracks computer languages, not frameworks. I’m interested in how Symfony compares with the other PHP MVC frameworks. Borrowing the search idea from TIOBE, I just ran these searches:
The results (how many hits on Google):
Symfony – 6,270,000 (3,900,000 for ‘php’ and ’symfony’ together)
CodeIgniter – 748,000
Cake – 4,540,000
Drupal – 28,500,000
A comparison: Ruby On Rails: 12,600,000
Meanwhile, WordPress blows away everything else: 295,000,000
My guess is that WordPress has retarded the growth of PHP MVC frameworks. The 80/20 rule applies here with some force. WordPress meets the needs of most people who need a website. PHP allows for self-contained software, such as WordPress, which is something the world of Ruby has not seen. Ruby on the web has largely meant Ruby On Rails, which one has to be a programmer to setup and use. Designers, intelligent people who are not programmers, all such people can default to WordPress.
From the point of view of a computer programmer, the code in WordPress is fairly awful. But designers love WordPress, and it needs to be given credit for successfully creating a package that designers feel comfortable with. No designer would know how to set up a Ruby On Rails site, but most web designers know how to set up a WordPress site. And for all its limitations and flaws, it must be acknowledged as the dominant platform written in PHP. Compared to WordPress, all the MVC PHP frameworks are just a footnote.
I’m going to repeat these searches every 3 months, and see how these ranks change over time.
