Phalcon vs AIDA/web

Since the framework is and extension built in C it's extremely fast and efficient. It's actually one of the fastest PHP frameworks, and according to some benchmarks it's the fastest framework out there.

Phalcon is open source and is available under the BSD License.

The Volt template engine, which is embedded into Phalcon itself takes it's inspiration from the Jinja template engine and as such it's nice to look at, with a clear and understandable syntax.

Volt also compiles very fast, like Phalcon itself, so it avoids being a bottleneck for the framework's overall speed.

You can set up the base project as you want. It's very flexible

Since the framework code is not in the project directory, the code is light and clean.

Zephir is a high-level language designed to create PHP extensions easily by PHP programmers with no knowledge in C.

Zephir does this by compiling directly to C and then the C program is in turn compiled to be run as a PHP extension. This, coupled with the fact that Zephir's syntax is very similar to PHP makes it a perfect way for PHP developers to use it for customizing Phalcon.

Some components can be used as standalone packages like models, views, etc..

Most frameworks seem to tend towards conceptually simple, but also stripped down (such as Python's Flask), or go the other way and be very fully featured, yet complex. AIDA/web, however, manages to give a programmer a lot of expressive power, while remaining conceptually simple -- an afternoon will get you building websites, and you'll feel comfortable with AIDA/web in just a week or so.

Program your web app in Smalltalk, an enjoyable and easy language to use. Smalltalk was the language to inspire modern Object-Oriented programming and pioneered many of the programming concepts used today, such as MVC.