The market for PHP frameworks is now becoming more crowded with Lithium, CakePHP and Zend Framework all vying for developer interest. Woodworth explained to that the core developers of Lithium were leaders in the CakePHP community for several years. All that experience was used to build a new framework from the ground up to leverage the new features in PHP 5.3.
When comparing Lithium to Zend Framework, Woodworth said they are both great PHP frameworks that serve different needs. In his view, Zend Framework is a library of tools that can be combined to make an application framework. In contrast, Lithium is a lightweight, full-stack framework with easy integration of third-party libraries.