What php framework would you recommend to a seasoned developer?

Hello everyone! I'm using php for over 2 years and I am thinking about improving my efficiency. I saw that there are lots of frameworks that promise they will help you with that(cake php, zope etc). What php framework do you use/used and really helped you in getting the things done faster and better? (please note that I would like something that can scale to big projects)

What php framework would you recommend to a seasoned developer?
I've played with a bunch of PHP frameworks including cake and blue shoes. The only one that I've been happy with is Zend framework. It's made by the PHP people, it's all OO and it's done really really well. We use it at our company and it does some nifty things like handling SOAP and REST calls. It's lightweight and fast.





The downside is that it's in the early stages of development so you'll need to be flexible enough to upgrade frequently as new feature become available. I'm normally very anti-framework when it comes to big projects, and in PHP land, there's a lot of crap frameworks. But Zend FW cuts down development time, scales nicely and is easy to work with.
Reply:If you need to scale, forget frameworks. The amount of unnecessary baggage you carry within a framework can be staggering; using frameworks speeds up development, but the resulting code is almost always memory-hungry and often contains poorly written machine-generated SQL. The end result is bloated codebase and suboptimal database usage...





Alternatively, you can build project-specific frameworks. This way, you ensure that any assumptions that you make when developing a framework are valid for your project and domain.





And, by the way, Zope is a Python, not a PHP, framework...

pollen