Taking a look at ten different PHP frameworks III

WACT - Web Application Toolkit

WACT looks quite promising, and it has the basic things a framework needs, like MVC, database objects and a template engine, but that's about it. It doesn't have any extra modules, and it definitely lacks a few inbuilt things, like Ajax, caching, an authentication module and more.

WACT does have one of the best template engines though, and it even allows you to create your own template tags to add certain functionality.

Prado

Prado is a very unique framework, and it offers some really cool features. It doesn't come with inbuilt support for MVC (from what I can tell), but it does have all kinds of components to handle most of the usual PHP tasks, and what's even neater it that it makes event-driven scripts possible. For example, it's possible to set an onClick event on a HTML button that links to a PHP function. This closely resembles ASP.NET, and Prado contains more ASP.NET components, like a GridView and a Repeater Control.

By looking at the comparison chart it might seem that Prado is a bit weak compared to the others, but this isn't true. Because Prado is so unique, it doesn't score a lot of points on the chart, but in reality it is very powerful.

PHP on Trax

This framework seems to be a PHP port of Ruby and Rails, and used to be called PHP on Rails. Unfortunately documentation is quite sparse, so it's hard to determine what this framework offers, but its documentation does mention ActiveRecord, so it probably offers ActiveRecord, just like RoR. Another thing it includes is inbuilt support for Ajax, and the two demos that can be found on the website clearly show this.

PHP on Trax is on the right way, but it's still missing a few things, like an authentication module and a caching module. It doesn't have any extra modules either, so it's all a bit basic at the moment.

ZooP Framework

The ZooP Framework is really feature-packed, and as the chart clearly shows, it supports almost anything, except for an ORM layer. What's even more surprising is that it runs on PHP4, which is really exceptional considering all the functionality it offers.

Another thing ZooP offers is inbuilt GUI controls, making it very easy to create forms quickly. It supports most of the basic form elements, and that advantage of using GUI controls over regular HTML is that you can tightly integrate validation logic with the GUI controls.