http://www.ttlsa.com/php/yii-yaf-ci-php/
http://www.sitepoint.com/best-php-framework-2015-sitepoint-survey-results/
Best PHP IDE for 2014 – Survey
One month ago, we started
the annual SitePoint framework popularity survey. Now that the month
has expired, it’s time to look at the results and to distribute the
prizes. The response was a whopping ~7800 entries, far more than any
other survey we’ve held so far, and even after filtering out invalid
entries we end up with a formidable number of valid participants.
First things first, as promised, here is the entire result set for your perusal and use: download.
Do with it as you please. If you come up with some interesting graphs,
please do share them with us! Read the “Data” paragraph below for some
more details on the downloadable files.
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Framework Winner
To view the full screen versions of all plots below, just click on them. They open in new tabs.
As expected, Laravel won by a large margin once again.
Interactive version:
Interactive version:
Some people were worried that splitting the versions for some
frameworks but sparing Laravel may influence the results and give it an
unfair advantage, but as we can see, Laravel wins even if you merge all
other framework versions.
The data below will be presented in tabular form, simply because I
didn’t have time to make pretty graphs yet and a lot of you were very
impatient to hear the results. I’ll update the graphics soon.
Framework Winner by Country
If we look at all the countries with more than 50 votes, these are their favorites:
Country | Total Votes | Work Favorite | Votes | Personal Favorite | Votes |
United States | 819 | Laravel | 219 | Laravel | 293 |
Czech Republic | 770 | Nette | 611 | Nette | 639 |
United Kingdom | 496 | Laravel | 138 | Laravel | 166 |
Germany | 428 | Symfony2 | 76 | Laravel | 100 |
France | 343 | Symfony2 | 149 | Symfony2 | 136 |
Brazil | 305 | Laravel | 100 | Laravel | 111 |
India | 287 | Laravel | 62 | Laravel | 77 |
Ukraine | 263 | PHPixie | 66 | PHPixie | 67 |
Indonesia | 242 | CodeIgniter | 77 | Laravel | 64 |
Russian Federation | 235 | Yii 2 | 53 | Yii 2 | 72 |
Poland | 216 | Symfony2 | 52 | Symfony2 | 46 |
Netherlands | 209 | Laravel | 64 | Laravel | 84 |
Romania | 183 | Symfony2 | 49 | Symfony2 | 48 |
Canada | 138 | Laravel | 40 | Laravel | 52 |
Spain | 131 | Symfony2 | 47 | Symfony2 | 43 |
Vietnam | 112 | Laravel | 34 | Laravel | 43 |
Iran | 101 | Laravel | 34 | Laravel | 35 |
Italy | 100 | Laravel | 20 | Laravel | 25 |
Australia | 99 | Laravel | 30 | Laravel | 39 |
Slovakia | 94 | Nette | 48 | Nette | 47 |
Belgium | 79 | Laravel | 26 | Laravel | 31 |
Serbia | 78 | Laravel | 20 | Laravel | 29 |
Hungary | 73 | Laravel | 17 | Laravel | 19 |
Turkey | 71 | Laravel | 26 | Laravel | 28 |
Mexico | 68 | Laravel | 22 | Laravel | 21 |
Bulgaria | 66 | Laravel | 13 | Laravel | 20 |
Lithuania | 65 | Symfony2 | 22 | Laravel | 26 |
Thailand | 58 | CodeIgniter | 14 | Laravel | 16 |
Pakistan | 57 | CodeIgniter | 14 | CodeIgniter | 13 |
Philippines | 54 | Laravel | 15 | Laravel | 16 |
Argentina | 52 | Laravel | 16 | Laravel | 21 |
Bangladesh | 51 | Laravel | 18 | Laravel | 16 |
Belarus | 51 | Symfony2 | 20 | Symfony2 | 19 |
Portugal | 50 | Laravel | 12 | Laravel | 17 |
It’s an interesting trend to observe. Most English speaking countries
favor Laravel, while France is loyal to Symfony – it’s own product.
Interestingly, an incredibly large percentage of Czechs (the second most
active country in the survey!) favor Nette – a framework largely
unknown in the western world, while Ukraine has its own local favorite –
PHPixie. It gets even more interesting when you look at the top five
for each country – not just the winner – but I’ll leave that up to you
to explore!
Framework by Age Group
Finally, if we take a look at the top 5 frameworks of each age group, we get this:
Group: Under 18 | Votes: 131 |
Work Favorites | Votes | Personal Favorites | Votes |
PHPixie | 73 | PHPixie | 73 |
Laravel | 24 | Laravel | 27 |
Nette | 8 | Nette | 9 |
No Framework | 6 | No Framework | 5 |
CodeIgniter | 4 | Symfony2 | 4 |
Group: 18 – 25 | Votes: 2433 |
Work Favorites | Votes | Personal Favorites | Votes |
Laravel | 604 | Laravel | 720 |
Nette | 329 | Nette | 338 |
PHPixie | 259 | PHPixie | 259 |
Symfony2 | 258 | Symfony2 | 255 |
CodeIgniter | 178 | Yii 2 | 194 |
Group: 26 – 35 | Votes: 3870 |
Work Favorites | Votes | Personal Favorites | Votes |
Laravel | 788 | Laravel | 1049 |
Symfony2 | 636 | Symfony2 | 597 |
CodeIgniter | 292 | Yii 2 | 323 |
Nette | 285 | Nette | 303 |
Yii 2 | 258 | CodeIgniter | 235 |
Group: 36 – 45 | Votes: 1044 |
Work Favorites | Votes | Personal Favorites | Votes |
Laravel | 191 | Laravel | 249 |
Symfony2 | 146 | Symfony2 | 134 |
CodeIgniter | 91 | Yii 2 | 79 |
Zend Framework 2 | 77 | Zend Framework 2 | 71 |
Company Internal Framework | 73 | CodeIgniter | 68 |
Group: 45+ | Votes: 252 |
Work Favorites | Votes | Personal Favorites | Votes |
Laravel | 52 | Laravel | 66 |
CodeIgniter | 31 | No Framework | 29 |
Symfony2 | 23 | CodeIgniter | 27 |
No Framework | 21 | Yii 2 | 22 |
Yii 2 | 19 | Zend Framework 2 | 14 |
Laravel, again, taking the lead in all, with Symfony usually
following closely, except in the curious case of the underaged group –
did PHPixie get introduced in a school and get points there? Worth
looking into. Nothing really unexpected in these – except that only the
youngest and oldest group seem to be “keeping it real” with “No
Framework”. It’s also apparent that CodeIgniter, even in its current
state, still maintains a very strong legacy and a loyal userbase.
Interestingly, Phalcon’s popularity dropped drastically when compared to last year – it effectively dropped off the charts – but that’s also likely due to the much bigger sample size this year.
Unfortunately, due to some complaints from last year, we didn’t
include gender data in this survey. It would have been an interesting
vector.
On Success
What follows is my opinion on why Laravel won again, read ahead if you’re interested in my take on things.
To the framework maintainers / owners out there. If you want to make
it big – Laravel kind of big – recognize what Taylor has been doing.
It’s not enough to just have good code. In fact, looking deeper
into more than one framework can really disappoint a person,
code-quality-wise. Just the other day, I was asked
about Cake vs CodeIgniter and, having looked at CI’s source, got some
serious 2008-level PTSD. The key to succeeding is, actually, advertising
– as sad as that truth may be.
Taylor not only made sure Laravel has near perfect documentation, he also built (directly or indirectly) several other
commercial services and partnerships around it. Laracasts covers all the
missing docs and use cases, Forge and Envoyer are tuned for Laravel,
and he frequently communicates with various bloggers about upcoming
features and releases before they’re ready, so that they get maximum
exposure on release time. The framework has its own subreddit, Packalyst
is like Packagist but just for Laravel (!?), and there’s also
Larajobs.com, which is borderline ridiculous. Laravel even has its own
t-shirts (though the design leaves something to be desired). This may
sound like typical marketing gobbledygook to you, but it works – social
engineering is real, and to commercially succeed with your brand, you
need to embrace it for what it really is – a brand.
If you’re serious about making money off of your open source work,
don’t be afraid to invest in these matters. For example, get a good
logo. Don’t trust your design abilities, you’re just not good.
If you were, you’d have been a designer, not a PHP dev. Paying a couple
hundred bucks for a good one will pay off in the long run. Don’t get
your friend/daughter/partner to design it for you, else you may end up
with something like this:
Don’t publish documentation or website copy text without having someone disconnected look at it first – proper English is incredibly
important for first impressions. Don’t be afraid to approach potential
developer evangelists – try to get people to believe in your product by
asking them what they dislike. Shape your product around other people’s
desires and opinions, don’t swim hardheadedly against the current, and
don’t let your ego feel insulted because someone suggested a solution
that, when looked at objectively, could just be better than yours. Get a
developer evangelist to write tutorials and other technical pieces
about your framework – in time, the relationship may just grow into a
Laravel->Laracasts mutually lucrative one. Don’t release half-baked
products, and don’t do alphas and betas publicly. There’s no need to
have public announcements about those – announce an RC or two, and
release. Exposing people to an imperfect product too early does more
harm than good. When was the last time Laravel had a beta release?
Look, I’ll be the first one to admit that Laravel is good. It really
is, and I use it for some of my projects purely due to simplicity – one
command and you’re good to go? Sold! I don’t even care about the
underlying bloat of hardcore framework components that power it – it’s
so simple to use, I can easily spend that time on optimization later on
if I ever end up needing it – I’ll just rewrite part of the framework in Zephir if
performance becomes THAT important (spoiler alert: it won’t). But I’m
also bothered by this looming monopoly and the frankly astounding
incompetence of other framework communities. Locking yourselves into
your isolated environments is not good community management. Having a
forum is not enough – interacting with other forums is better. Spread
the word, analyze solutions from other people, discuss them. Be open, be
transparent. Have an official blog, get a StackOverflow tag, justify
your decisions, get in touch with popular publications which can help promote your framework if you present it well enough.
That said, I’d like to invite framework maintainers and those
competent in the usage of those projects to get in touch – let’s build a
good repository of cross-framework content. Let’s compare solutions, do
“versus” posts not for the sake of one framework winning over others,
but for the sake of comparing approaches and learning from each other.
You have one year until the next survey – use this time to get exposure.
Use it to teach, not dictate – to collaborate, not judge. Let’s make it
happen – let’s tilt the scales for next year.
Data
The data for this survey is all in the repo.
While most of the aggregation was done with R, I have a feeling some of
you may want to use PHP to process this, so I’ve included some helper
files – the details are all in the repo’s README file. I’ve mainly
extracted the age group and education level into integers so that the
whole set takes up less space and has some more robust data types
inside, and I replaced Typeform’s funky multi-select answer format with
the number one (1) where the answer was selected (originally, Typeform
copies the name of the answer into the answer field, wasting a whole lot
of space).
I also extracted the header fields and countries into separate PHP
files (in order of appearance) so you can have them open on a separate
screen or even include them directly if you need them.
Many thanks to Jetbrains for providing us with three PhpStorm licenses, and to Zend for three Zend Studio licenses, rewarding the total top six resharers of this survey. In numbers of reshares and the country they’re from, they were:
168 (Czech Republic)
97 (Brazil)
84 (Germany)
54 (Indonesia)
53 (UK)
26 (Bangladesh)
The first three have been contacted, and once they’ve made their choice clear the other three will get their rewards.
Likewise, three random people with valid email addresses have been contacted about their three-month Learnable subscriptions.
Many thanks to all who participated and to all who reshared the
survey – without your efforts we couldn’t have built such an amazing
body of responses. Stay tuned for more in depth analyses further down
the road!
Conclusion
With another survey drawing to a close, we’re once again reminded how
much a good, healthy community matters. How much do you agree/disagree
with my idea of why Laravel won above? Do you feel like the factors I
mention aren’t that important in the grand scheme of things, or do you
think I’m right on some points? Let us know in the comments below – and
remember, the data is available for download,
so if you come up with some interesting graphs, share them with us and
we’ll add them to this post! Likewise, if you’d like some other
correlations and vectors explored but don’t feel like fiddling with the
data, let us know!
Bruno
is a coder from Croatia with Master’s Degrees in Computer Science and
English Language and Literature. He’s the editor of SitePoint’s PHP
channel and a developer evangelist for Diffbot.com. He avoids legacy code like the plague and when picking projects makes sure they’re as cutting edge as possible. He’s a treadmill desk enthusiast and active (board)gamer who sometimes blogs.