Two Types of Phalcon Projects: Full-stack and Micro

Generally, there are two types of MVC frameworks: full-stack frameworks (like Symfony, Yii) and micro frameworks (like Lumen, Slim, Silex).

Full-stack frameworks are a good choice for a big project since they provide more functionality, but they need a bit more qualification and time to run.

Micro frameworks allow you to create lightweight prototypes very quickly, but they lack functionality, and so it’s generally better to avoid using them for large projects. One advantage of micro frameworks, however, is their performance. They are usually much faster than full-stack ones (for example, the Yaf framework is inferior in performance only to raw PHP).

PhalconPHP supports both: You can either create a full-stack or a micro application. Even better, when you develop your project in PhalconPHP as a micro application, you still have access to most of Phalcon’s powerful features and its performance still remains faster than as a full-stack application.

At a past job, my team needed to build a high-load RESTful system. One of the things we did was compare prototype performance between a full-stack application in Phalcon and a Phalcon micro application. We found that PhalconPHP’s micro applications tended to be a lot faster. I can’t show you any benchmarks due to NDA reasons, but in my opinion, if you want to make the most of Phalcon’s performance, use micro applications. While it’s less convenient to code a micro application than a full-stack one, PhalconPHP’s micro applications still have everything that you might need for your project and better performance. To illustrate, let’s write a very simple RESTful micro application in Phalcon.