CakePHP vs Li3

Cake has a built-in ORM which is pretty easy to use and learn. Building queries can also be done very easily and fetching entire columns can be done in one or two lines of code.

Developing in CakePHP is very fast and flexible.

CakePHP is about fast and reliable development, it achieves this by following the convention over configuration principle as it's heavily inspired by Rails (which follows the same programming paradigm).

Convention over configuration is all about making it easier for the developer to start immediately writing code without worrying on what's going on "under the hood".

CakePHP has a large library of helper classes with features such as:

• Authorization
• AJAX
• Forms
• E-mails
• Internationalization
  etc...

Cake's great community has thrown together an exhaustive and amazing list of resources to get started with CakePHP. It's open source and can be found on GitHub.

CakePHP open source and is licensed under the MIT license.

Lithium has unified the relational and non-relational database APIs into a single one. Being one of the few frameworks to do it.

Lithium makes use of PHP namespaces to create a powerful plugin architecture. Almost every component of the framework is replaceable.

This framework loads faster than most due to its class autoloader. It is flexible as well and handles older classes - but requires the developer to define transforms here for naming convention, includes, etc. Many other frameworks use Composer for autoloading and that significantly slows down their bootstrap time because Composer's autoloader is extremely compatible without much developer interaction (it does not require as much involvement for autoloading legacy libraries). So it's a trade-off, speed vs. a little bit of up-front work.

Lithium comes with integrated unit testing. It also has a test dashboard.

Lithium's filter system is based on the paradigm of Aspect-oriented programming which aims to increase modularity by separating cross-cutting concerns and helping speed up development.

Lithium can return JSON and many other formats from the same actions that render templates increasing productivity in many cases. It handles a "type" key in the route which allows it to render various responses with different Content-Types. This is incredibly useful and easy to extend. This combined with closures in routes makes Lithium a very good framework for building a RESTful API.