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.