I am starting a new project and thought this would be a great opportunity to start learning a framework and use that as the basis for the new project/site, especially since they seem to be all the rage these days as well. In the past I have developed a lot of my applications simply by writing either plugins for things like e107 or Joomla, as they do a lot of the heavy work like user management and authentication so already make the development time and life cycle fast since all I need to worry about is the logic of my code tied into theirs. So when looking at these frameworks I tend to look at them and wonder whether it is worth my while relearning how to drive if you will. I mean will I miss the boat, miss out on work or really be that far behind if I choose not to use a framework and instead develop by piggy backing off of technology I have already learned? Is there any real strong case for really bothering with the bigger frameworks in general? Dan
Bigger frameworks (generally) as you know offer increased features, which in turn allows you to develop faster. Don't worry if you're not using a framework - you don't have to, most frameworks are at least 10x slower than procedual PHP. Dan
Well, I don't think its 10x slower, because in a framework you can choose specifically what class you want to use. In the bootstrap of each index file, just add the classes you will be using, like for example in Zend Framework, You will be needing the Zend_Controller to deliver the requests, Zend_Controller_Router_Rewrite(to stay on the line of clean urls), Zend_ACL to sketch your hierarchy system, Zend_Auth to authenticate each user. And finally Zend_DB Those are pretty much the ones you need just to start a simple application. A framework will never load all the components it uses unless you state it. Oh and never use Zend_Loader, as there isn't many benefits. Stick to oldschool require_once and that of course if you are planning to use ZF Well, that goes to most of the frameworks. Good luck
Here is their resolution That was a refreshing entry though, reminds me not to use codeigniter (well i wasn't planning, learning ZF is already a bit of an headache since its long) I was going to mention about benchmarking, do note that everything vary on how the person is doing the logical code. Point is, that most hosting have their servers geared up, if he did it in a local computer with low specs well it will obviously be a problem =/
Yeah that bench mark isn't really that real world at all. The frameworks are broken down into classes while the PHP example is just one file using the procedular mysql functions. No real world application is going to use mysql_query() mysql_connect(). They'd be much more likely to have a wrapper of some kind. A lot of that overhead I bet relates to all the file includes going on in the frameworks compared to the straight PHP and the loading of the classes. It would have been more interesting if they made a more real world like design of a php example. So maybe a class to handle the MySQL, MVC style setup so it would not be calling it all within the index. At the end of the day for any decent size application it is cheaper to buy more powerful hardware then spend months longer in development. I thin
I have started using the Cake blog tutorial as this should give me the basic groundings in form generation and data management with a framework and will start building with this. Once I have the concepts down pat I will look at Zend , kind of want to understand a framework first so the learnign curb is smaller. In a way the way I used e107 was as a framework, essentially using its classes to make all sorts of crazy applications, it just didn't have the over all power I needed, most of the time it is merely the SQL wrappers that I heavily use. Cheers for the advice guys