CakePHP vs Silex

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.

The thing that makes Silex stand out from other PHP microframeworks is the fact that it's built using some of Symfony2's components. Making it quite powerful but still lightweight enough to be considered a true microframework.

Silex is open source and is licensed under the MIT license.

Based on Pimple, Silex has a simple Dependency Injection container that consists of just one file and one class.

Silex makes use of Symfony2's HttpKernel which is used to abstract requests and responses. This in turn, makes it very easy to test apps created with the framework.

By using Pimple, the Silex application extends the Pimple class, which in turn is nothing more than an implementation of the ArrayAccess interface that has been a part of PHP since version 5.0.

This makes it possible to use an instance of the Application class as if it were an array. Like so:

$app = new Silex\Application();

$app['config'] = new Config($config_path);

This gives developers a great deal of flexibility when injecting dependencies and when testing.