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Add to SafariWhen comparing Slim vs Kohana, the Slant community recommends Slim for most people. In the question“What are the best PHP frameworks?” Slim is ranked 1st while Kohana is ranked 20th. The most important reason people chose Slim is:
Slim's documentation is well organized and detailed, every concept is thoroughly explained and it is very helpful for both advanced users and beginners.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Well organized and thorough documentation
Slim's documentation is well organized and detailed, every concept is thoroughly explained and it is very helpful for both advanced users and beginners.
Pro A good starting point
Slim is minimal and that is a good thing if you want to start from there. It can be easily extended and even supports popular packages that are used in Laravel (like Illuminate\Database (eloquent)) for example.
Pro REST based
REST fans will love the REST based architecture.
Pro Supports tie-ins for Rack-like middleware
Rack is an interface used in Ruby frameworks used to group and order modules, which most of the time are Ruby classes, and specify between them.
Slim uses a simple concept for it's middleware. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses it unifies the middleware into a single method call.
Pro Useful classes
Contains classes for managing requests, responses, cookies, logging, views, HTTP caching, and more.
Pro Flexible
Slim doesn't demand that you stick to a fixed folder structure. As long as you load Slim the right way you can do anything from there the way you like it.
Pro Extremely lightweight
Paired with swoole it's a micro service powerhouse.
Pro Open source
The Slim Framework is open source and is released under the MIT public license
Pro Extremely customizable
You can add any dependency, package or class that you want to use as a contained dependency.
Pro Supports Php 5.3 and PHP 7
Pro Makes it easy to understand the way some abstract functions and classes are built
In Django most things are abstracted, you just call some function or class without knowing how they were built, but with Slim, you end up understanding the way some abstract functions and classes are built.
Pro Hooks for executing code at different points in its life-cycle
Slim supports code hooks for executing functions at different points in time during the application's lifecycle.
Pro Lightweight
With no PECL extensions or PEAR libraries to increase it's bloat, Kohana is extremely lightweight and massive libraries are avoided for more consistency and speed.
Pro OOP framework that is extremely DRY
Kohana follows the OOP software paradigm and it strictly enforces the DRY principle, which makes it easier for developers to write clean and maintainable code.
Pro Tools for quick development
Includes tools that help developers to make applications quickly and efficiently. Some of these tools include:
- Translation libraries
- Code profiling
- Form validation
etc...
Pro Open source
Kohana is open source and is released under the BSD license, this means that it can be modified even for commercial purposes.
Pro Low RAM usage
It is as fast as any popular framework, but the RAM usage is really low in comparison.
Cons
Con Very little consistency among different versions
There have been quite some changes that break the compatibility between Slim 2 and Slim 3. Even if you learned how to work with the Slim 2, you will find that Slim 3 requires re-training.
Con Dependency injection is too weak
It is not really dependency injection, but just a configurable container.
Con Needs strong bases to create dependencies
The dependency container schema of Slim is one of the biggest PROS and CONS of the framework. It is true that this schema brings so much flexibility to add anything, but another thing that is true is that you need to have strong bases of patterns, and an extensive knowledge of your libraries to convert it into a Slim dependency.
Con Too minimal
While it's true that Slim is a microframework, it's still too minimal. When used for throwaway projects or simple prototypes, it's perfect. But in the long run, it becomes less and less useful and you end up in implementing a full custom framework in trying to tackle all the missing features.
Con Poorly documented
Kohana has always been criticized for the poor documentation it has. Some things are not explained with details and some other things are not explained at all.
Con Deprecated PHP Framework
