I'm about to begin building a huge clinical healthcare application with PHP, and I'm looking for some advice on a framework. I need to be able to come up with a quick prototype, so it's important that the framework takes care of many mundane tasks; therefore, I've narrowed it down to CakePHP or Symfony.
I'm hoping to get a few developers opinions that have worked with both frameworks.
Thanks, Pete
IBM published an article here on both those frameworks along with Zend in a comparisson, see:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-fwk1/?S_TACT=105AGX44&S_CMP=ART
I personally use CakePHP, it's pretty awesome compared to just straight out PHP. Easy to build things in, very MVC focused, reasonable integration with third party components. I did have some issues with the lack of any sort of discernable upgrade path between versions though. I can't speak for Symfony, but I believe it's more heavyweight than CakePHP.
Take a look at the screencasts for CakePHP as well, they give a good overview: