Let's have a fireside chat about PHP frameworks. First off: Holy fuck. People who use PHP frameworks for some ungodly reason think they are comparable to Zeus. There reasoning is one giant circle. "I am better for using a framework because I use a framework." Not only this, but those who don't use frameworks or don't abide by the MVC design approach are considered "coding cowboys". These guys need to chill the heck out.

So that's the preface. I recently looked into abiding by some sort of encapsulation bullshit and started with CakePHP. The documentation was confusing to say the least. I began by trying to do something simple, but it turned out to be grossly difficult. For those not familiar, Cake essentially tries to copy Ruby on Rails, which is a framework for Ruby. The logic != sense. (See what I did there?) One framework basing itself on another framework from another language makes about as much sense as the plebeians who use terms like "coding cowboys".

Well, suffice to say, CakePHP was not for me. I looked into the well known Zend Framework. After 'installing' (unzipping) it, I gave up because I realized that it was not a true framework. It was just another collection of PHP libraries. "Well fuck me," I thought to myself. So my endevoir continued.

I finally settled on CodeIgniter because the documentation was award winning. After an hour or two of tinkering I found that the whole framework trend was a load of hoarse shit. A framework makes sense for something like C++ where coding a UI is about as fun as getting shot in the foot. However, for a simple scripting language like PHP it is totally unnecessary. The greatest feature in any of these frameworks? They provide an htaccess file to rewrite the URLs. That is why I now use PHP frameworks. I feel so trendy.

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Hey there.

omg first!

sup steefers.

I know shit about PHP. Talk to me about C++ some time.

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sf_skiff

I hate C++, too complex for my coding knowledge.

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Hey there.

Stieffers miss the point. I'm by no means a framework evangelist, (the majority of projects I do I use my own much simpler database/templating engine), however I have used them on larger projects, which is kind of the point.

They're pretty much invaluable when you're working on large scale projects with lots of database interaction and lots of user interaction. I also don't see how they change UI coding that much? They're more about splitting up your code, design and database interaction in a meaningful way.

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God.

Which is why I use them.

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Hey there.

yeah using anything really complicated automatically makes you a l33t haxzor

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When Im making something, I just keep it a quite straightforward, simple and yet very efficient framework.

Like this example:

Very effective when using k'nex or technical lego. I don't think cake would be a good building material because it just crumbles to easily. Although this zend stuff sounds interesting, is it a new type of carbon reinforced metal alloy?
At least you see sound trendy steffers ^^

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Tried symfony and cake because lots of clients ask for experience in one (and they usually don't know why, but they saw someone else list it as a requirement so hey, it must be important!) they both seemed to be a fun way to over-complicate abstraction and give access to some libraries at the cost of efficiency.

Moved on to code igniter which actually seemed to be helpful in getting things done quickly. But still, nothing impressive. (I stick with this one if I'm forced to use something though)

See the frameworks like SF prebuilts; fuck writing a new database abstraction layer/any other common component, let's just use this one and cope with its flaws.

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cocks guys

I was very unimpressed with Cake and Symphony, simply because they try to do too much and destroy performance.

CodeIgniter was alright, then I found LightVC. Super lightweight, and performance is acceptable for an MVC-based solution. No libraries, it's gives you only MVC organization and that's it. That's what I like, because I find that most of the general purpose libraries out there are either (a) crap or (b) too general to work well in my problem domain. If you need ORM, its sister project CoughPHP works very nicely as well.

I'm kinda sick of web development though. It's pretty boring and anyone can build something marginal without much thought. Embedded systems is where it's at. Lots of exciting stuff going on there. Wickedly clever people, too.

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