SELECTING A PHP FRAMEWORK FOR A WEB APPLICATION PROJECT - THE METHOD AND CASE STUDY

Considering any PHP project in terms of its purpose and requirements, the choice of the most appropriate framework significantly affects the cost of a project and time necessary for designing and developing it, as well the likelihood of its successful completion. However, it is a very difficult task to make, because it requires conducting a multi-criteria comparison among numerous available frameworks. This paper presents a multi-criteria method of selecting a PHP framework for a specific PHP web application project and also compares selected frameworks with the goal of designing and carrying out a specific project.

There are many multi-criteria comparison methods, and choosing the appropriate one affects the possibility of conducting comprehensive research and the clarity of results. Another crucial comparison factor consists in selecting adequate comparison criteria and adjusting their respective weights. In the paper, the choice of a comparison method as well as its criteria and weights are discussed and justified for the specified project. Moreover, the values of measurable criteria are determined in order to compare in the clearest possible way the features of all the analyzed frameworks with regard to the specified project, and finally, the results of the comparison are presented. The analysis includes the following frameworks: CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Laravel, Symfony, Yii, and Zend Framework.

The article describes an actual web application project named Expansible Communication Platform for e-University (XCPU), which was designed to improve communication between the university authorities, teachers and students in order to gain information for the decision-making process. The XCPU project is described with its requirements and conditions characteristic . Together with the results of the case study of selecting a proper PHP framework in the context of the described XCPU project, the article also presents the detailed procedure of framework selection, the algorithm and the calculations with their results.