IMagick vs. MagickWand for PHP

[hknight]

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using "IMagick" compared to "MagickWand for PHP"?

Please provide me with objective reasons to choose one solution or the other.

I am creating a PHP framework, and I need to write special classes for creating buttons, resizing images, creating custom frames for images and much more.

I don't want to use shell_exec() in my main code.

Thanks for your thoughts.

[mkoppanen]

Hello,

I don't know how objective my opinions are since I am one of the lead developers in imagick -project.

I can give you a few reasons why people might select imagick:

1. Object Oriented interface. No need to pass the resource handles around and you can extend the provided classes.
2. The main class (imagick) implements iterator interface so you can easily traverse trough the images read in the object.
3. Provided via the official PHP extension repository, PECL


Here is a few things you might consider disadvantage:

1. Requires PHP5 (at least PHP 5.1.3)
2. Is not installed on most of the shared hosts (some shared hosts install extension on demand)
3. Documentation is currently under heavy work (it's not completely done yet)


--
Mikko Koppanen