Question

I have been going round in circles with this question for days - which is the best PHP framework to use to create a RESTful Web service?

I've trawled the web for info and have come across three main factors that are important:

  • must have REST architecture built into the framework
  • must be a stable application
  • must be full featured

It may be that what I want does not exists, but I wanted to check with the community to see of I had missed something.

Currently the three contenders are:

CodeIgniter

Is a very stable framework with a large community and plenty of features and 'extensions'. Issue is that it's not RESTful. I have found a RESTful controller but there are a few things that I don't like about it. Mainly that it does not seem to correctly use the HTTP methods as per the RESTful architecture definition. I think this stems from restrictions in the CodeIgniter core though.

Yii

Again, seems like a large community and is stable with plenty of features, but not RESTful.

Laravel

A framework that is RESTful straight out of the box, and it has a good amount of features. The issue is that this is a relatively new framework so lacks stability.

Other frameworks I've considered:

Zend - from what I've read, avoid unless writing Enterprise software.

Recess - RESTful, but seems very inactive and under used.

UPDATE:

In the end I went for Laravel. Can't recommend it enough! I had a RESTful API up and running in a week and also a simple web client. Amazing framework.

No correct solution

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