Silex vs Zend Framework

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.

Zend is the most used PHP framework by big businesses. Zend is widely used and tested by a large number of banks, as well as companies, such as Allied Beverage, BBC, Shaklee, CarinBridge, BNP Paribas and more.

Partnered with Google, IBM, Adobe, Microsoft

Zend has a large library of predefined classes with which developers can create maintainable and stable web applications. This is done if the developer works within the constraints and with the components of these different predefined classes, which makes the application more maintainable.

Zend supports almost all kinds of databases out there. From MySQL, IBM DB2, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server to PostgreSQL.

For developpers not used to Zend, they can use a predefined structure and use preloaded components and classes to build and maintain their application. But for advanced developpers, they can customize the structure to stick to their needs (or their likings) and extend primary Zend components for fine-tuned apps or replace the initial predefined Zend components by third parties components such as Doctrine ORM or another logging or templating framework.

Apigility is a collection of Zend Framework modules. It's useful for building the API architecture of a web app quickly and painlessly by providing a flexible engine.

Apigility also has a web-based UI that allows developers to quickly create and modify API services, configure authentication, set authorization rules, set up validation and write new documents.