I am not sure why it is taking long with PHP to have WSDL auto-generation feature? May be loose typing..!

Anyway current implementation of Zend's WSDL generation with Zend_Soap_AutoDiscover doesn't seems to be perfect. It is having issues with Complex Type. Although you can manually generate WSDL with the help of Zend_Soap_Wsdl.

When I tried with AutoDiscovery feature results were surprising for Complex Type, behavior of generator was weired. Let's hope that Zend will fix issues with this great feature before their final release. Documentation is also in it's building stage and needs more examples and better compilation. Download Zend Framework from here, and try with tar.gz, it looks like zip is not working for me (more than once) with current compilation due to some reason.

Previously I have used WSDL generator class from jool.nl, it was quite handy and easy to configure and uses Reflections to generate WSDL from PHP Docs just like Zend Framework.Similar Posts:

• My experiences with SOAP Web-service PHP vs .NET
• Top Open Source PHP Frameworks
• Setting up PHP, MySQL, Apache with most up-to-date WAMP Package
• CodeIgniter 2 is just here – about to release..!
• Netbeans 7.0 RC1 Released

Dustin Whittle from Yahoo! has presented a case study on redeveloping Y! Answers with symfony and Yahoo!’s decision for choosing symfony as their development. Download presentation Yahoo! Answers - The Symfony way..!

These are some of the great and most joyful moments for Team symfony, I would like to congratulate symfony team for their great work.

Similar Posts:

• Symfony 1.2 first Beta is out
• Top Open Source PHP Frameworks
• jQuery 1.5.2 and jQuery mobile alpha 4 released
• BlogRush shutdowns
• When PHP Frameworks are going to stop PHP 4 support?

Symfony: Now it is more then 2 year old project and seems to be quite complete in the sense of feature and documentation. Symfony has quite rich documentation and community support. Their development seems to be really active as I see many change-sets getting committed and bugs getting fixed every Monday. Today Symfony 1.0.12 is released and Symfony 1.1 is on the way to getting released. I have not tried any project with Symfony as of yet but have been keeping a close eye on their activity since long and now when 1.1 release is near thinking of start something with it. 1.1 version will come with quite a lot welcome changes and I am looking further to it. Fabien Potencier and his team gave great contribution to the PHP world by gifting Symfony framework.

Symfony is MVC architecture based PHP framework. It is more of less inspired by Majovi and Ruby on Rails. Symfony team is not trying to reinvent the wheel and framework uses many opensource components in their base. For beginners it is little difficult to begin with Symfony but great deal of documentation and 21 days of askeet tutorials will help them out really.

I believe Symfony is really enterprise level framework. It has great deal of documentation and The Book (Definitive guide to Symfony - Open source)

Symfony uses Propel as default ORM and it has Doctrine Plugin in case if you wish to replace Propel. Symfony has 2 real world powerful application Yahoo Bookmarks! and preview.delicious.com. Symfony is having quite comprehensive plugin repository too.

I am looking forward to get my hands on it in near future.

Compatibility: PHP 5.2+

CakePHP: Another RoR inspired framework for PHP. It is called a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications. Cake is having 1.1 release as stable and they are in their beta of 1.2 version which suppose to have many new features. Unlike Symfony CakePHP team believes in doing everything them self. It is quite popular and got quite a big community support. Project is under active development.

Compatibility: PHP 4 / 5

Prado: Prado is actually component-based and event-driven programming framework for developing Web applications in PHP 5. PRADO stands for PHP Rapid Application Development Object-oriented. It's current version is 3.1.1 and development activity seems to be little slower then previous two. It is actually Microsoft ASP.NET framework ported on PHP. I think it is great work by Prado Team to come up with such a framework in PHP. It depends on one's programming style that whether they will like it or not. I am not biased but I believe I would use original ASP.NET rather then it's clone in PHP. I appreciate Prado Teams efforts and it would really help who is migrating to PHP from ASP platform or want to migrate from PHP to ASP platform.

CodeIgniter: Another PHP Framework based on MVC architecture and it is easy to start with. It is easier for someone who is just starting with MVC and PHP. It's got good Documentation and quite comprehensive User Guide. It supports PHP 4 and PHP 5 both. Currently 1.6.1 is stable version. More or less like CakePHP and have it's own ORM module. CodeIgniter could be used in small to mid-sized PHP projects and your shared hosting server won't hurt with it.

Kohana: It's CodeIgniter brother, I mean based on CI. When CodeIgniter guys were giving more concentration on professional projects and request of CI users been pending then some of the community members started a new project and named Kohana. Kohana is strict PHP 5 framework. It comes with all the good features of CI and addes up where CI lacked or whatever was missing. It is quite appealing to me but documentation wise this project is behind CI.

Zend Framework: Zend The PHP Company..! The framework from Zend itself which is open source. It is quite loosely coupled and framework don't force you to follow any coding standards. You can continue with your own convention and still use Zend. Even using full framework is not required. One can pull useful class library from Zend Framework and use them in their own way. But somehow Zend is not able to attract mass with this framework. Zend tried to do everything from scratch for this framework although Pear has got really good class libraries which can be used to build on. Yes If you need to consume web-services it's got lot of stuff for you almost all famous web-services has been taken into consideration and specific classes to them has been developed so that you can consume it easily. Current stable version is 1.5 and it has got good documentation too. New Zend website is built on Zend Framework 1.5 and it supports PHP5 only.

Agavi: One more PHP 5 Framework which seems to be quite powerful and unique. I would like to paste their preface paragraph here to let you know more about it.

"Agavi is a Web Application Framework for PHP 5. While it lies in the nature of a framework to simplify the application development process, Agavi won't do that at any cost. The primary goals are flexibility, cleanliness and structure. You won't find HTML Form helper methods in Agavi (because they aren't necessary, we have something better, more on that later), and we use XML configuration files because we believe that they offer better structuring abilites than alternatives such as YAML. If you're looking for a solution that assists you in serious high-end development, that has smart and innovative solutions to common problems that haven't been solved properly before, and that encourages and enforces a clean development process to ensure your code remains maintainable and extensible, you've come to the right place."

Documentation and API Guide seems to be good but it's not for small projects and development seems to be quite slow. As current stable version is 0.11 which is same since quite a long time I believe it's difficult to advice someone to use in practical projects.

There are other frameworks too which I didn't talked about in my this blog post due to one reason or another to name few of them they are eZ Components, PHP on TRAX, Seagull, WACT, WASP, ZooP, Akelos, Fusebox and qcodo.

I would appreciate if readers will share their experiences in the form of comments with any of the PHP Framework.Similar Posts:

• When PHP Frameworks are going to stop PHP 4 support?
• Zend Framework 1.6 RC1 with WSDL AutoDiscovery
• Symfony 1.2 first Beta is out
• Setting up PHP, MySQL, Apache with most up-to-date WAMP Package
• Symfony 1.1 RC1 Released