If re-use between projects was really of concern for their community, they would've pushed for a standard http interface like rack - which they haven't, aside from a couple of brief (largely ignored) experiments.
php is a necessary evil in some instances simply because some useful apps have been built with it.. but if I'm writing a web application from the ground up there's no way I would opt for php.
While it maybe doesn't live up to it's RoR hype, it is a really solid framework, and has cut down on my development time by more than I can possibly express..
I find it alot easier to use than Symphony, and you can generally get a CRUD up and running in about 10-20 minutes right out of the box.
You may also want to email the likes of Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube, Digg etc etc and let them know of the evil that lurks within.
I've also been using PHP for the last 10 years and have never had problems scaling or writing good code.
I choose PHP, all that time ago, because back then I was a C developer. I fell in love with the fact you could create your own C extensions and that the PHP syntax was similar to C syntax, so it was easy to pick up and make it do what I wanted it to do.
I've only every toyed with frameworks, never used one as such, because I built my own library up over the years that is suited to my needs.
Yes, you can write scalable web apps with php.. you can also walk everywhere on your hands; but it's unnecessarily painful and awkward, so most sensible people avoid doing it on a regular basis.
The PHP SAPI handles the HTTP request and dissolves it into super globals for the environment to consume. This is all you need to handle a HTTP request. It just doesn't get any more minimal than that.
You can, if you want, take it a step further and add request routing, i.e. http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.controller.router.h...
That's also why all of those frameworks aren't very relevant to me. I have no use for server-side MVC because the server isn't involved in the application UI. I have no use for ORM, because building up an object structure in memory only to deflate it again into a web service response is often overkill. I do use Zend Framework, but I use it to simplify my transactional DB logic and to assist in bootstrapping the web services.
It does, however, have the same problem that a lot of other PHP frameworks have in that, unless you're really careful, your components are "trapped" because of the Yii idioms and base classes.
I think Mr Spatula's point stands. Code reusability in PHP is nothing like what it is in the Ruby world.
I'm curious, what other RoR influenced PHP framework features have you heard of?
PHP implementations run the gamut from basic low-hanging-fruit-grabbing attempts (like CodeIgniter's frankly, well, weird implementation) to fully-featured ones like Yii. I do agree that they goes as far as doing most of RoR's implementation and then just... stop.
> ... what other RoR influenced PHP framework features have you heard of?
RoR-like routing shows up frequently as well, and in Yii's case, Views templates have the same access to both directly-assigned template variables, and variables belonging to the controller instance itself.
Frankly I'm sick of articles such as these, as if the author is pleading with this selective community that it's OK to use PHP. Somewhat sickening. They should feel confident in the tools they use without having to justify it to anybody.