Akelos Framework
Being from Ruby on Rails background, I can’t help to compare other frameworks that I use to RoR. Maybe this is a bias comparison since some frameworks are built with different purpose in mind.
But there are some techniques that can be used within a framework that is independent of the overall purpose of the framework. One example is implementation of ORM that has been achieved beautifully in ActiveRecord in RoR. There are more such as MVC Design and agile development Techniques such as generators and helpers
Since I started developing in Joomla and Drupal, I’ve been feeling very frustrated with a lack of good ORM in PHP. So far the popular ones are Propel and Doctine. Symfony agile framwork is based on Propel. But the problem with mentioned ORMs is that there too many configurations to be done before you get to enjoy ORM in your applications.
Yesterday I came acorss Akelos Framework. I haven’t tested Akelos throughly but what I found very intriguing is that they followed RoR agile techniques very closely. Moreover their implementation of ORM is very similar to ActiveRecord in RoR. They even solved the model association meta programming done in RoR ActiveRecords such as ‘has_many’ or ‘belongs_to’ for PHP. checkout http://wiki.akelos.org/many_to_many_without_habtm
That’s Very nice.