6.2. Choosing a Framework for Building a Web Application

Small websites can be developed without using the MVC pattern. However, the larger your website gets, the more complicated it becomes to maintain, especially if more than one person is working on it. Hence, this is the pattern we are going to use for developing our web application.

Having decided to use the MVC pattern, we do have a few issues to think about. Development of an application modeled on this pattern is not so easy as it may seem, especially if we do not use third-party libraries. If you write everything on your own, you will have to solve a lot of problems: automatically loading .php files enabling the definition of classes, routing, and so on.

Several frameworks have been created for solving these problems, such as Yii, Laravel, Symphony, Kohana and many more. My personal preference is Laravel, so the development of the application described here is going to use this framework.