Suitable for framing

I have been looking for a framework to adopt for an existing large project. I have been using a RAD tool (Codecharge Studio, CCS) since the project's inception some years ago. It has treated me relatively well, allowing me to rapidly get the thing working, where it would probably have taken too long any other way.

But over that time I have come up against the limitations of this tool. It works great for what it does.

Which is this: it creates your CRUD pages from an existing database. This is somewhat ORM-ish, as it creates a set of classes that loosly match the MVC concept. And that works great for a lot of things, and its fast.

But these classes are not interoperable. You can't have one interact with another and have them create a SQL JOIN for instance, or even just embed one inside another (say updating one table requires inserting something in another). You also can't easy swap out parts of the MVC structure, like say having a choice of views for HTML or JSON output, or changing the model to one that doesn't interact with the database (lets say the data came from a remote call to another application). Its also hard to make the view more flexible, like having a variable number of columns.

So I've wound up hand coding some of the parts of my app.

Now I will probably still use CCS for some things, like the admin pages, were it works well. But the core of my app needs reworking to support more advanced AJAX style features, more modularity, etc.

But enough background.

What interests me in particular is the database layer, and the MVC structure. The ORM concept (be it model-creates-schema, schema-creates-model, or external tool creates both) is somewhat flawed, at least when it becomes "the end all solution" (see this), but I see it as similar to CCS -- a rapid dev tool that covers maybe 80% of the mundane stuff. The only thing that seems to be lacking really is that the ORM tools only cover the model and database, they don't help you with the view, where CCS does all three.

I would like to see the database layer have multiple options. I see no reason you can't have it support both defining the model first and then asking it to generate a schema, or having it be able to look at the schema and generate the model. Either way, when the application is done, the code should be largely the same. That is to say, the only time code or schema generation takes place is when you as a developer tell it to do so.

Now, on to MVC. From what I can see, it seems like all the PHP frameworks use MVC. Which is to say, that none of them use PAC or HMVC. The main thing here, for me, is that I want flexibility in the layout. I want to put multiple components (MVC/PAC/HMVC triads) on a web page, some of which may be collections of components, and I want a method of specifying arguments to each of them from the URL. The only framework I saw that did this was Claw, which seems to have been abandoned.

So what's the PHP framework for me? I don't know yet.