Choosing a development framework
During the past couple of years, Ruby on Rails has been getting massive attention and I never really got the time to dive into it - learned a couple things here and there, but haven’t really developed any application with it. I liked it for the same reasons that everyone else does: it’s a rapid development framework using the
Learning a new language (in this case 2, Ruby and Rails) is definitely exciting, but having to do that while developing a pretty advanced web application that needs to go live in less than 2 months, raises the bar pretty high.
So I opted for goold ol’ PHP. I have built all kinds of little scripts, hacked many open-source projects (as in modified them) and released 4 of my own turnkey solutions all based on PHP but never had I used an open-source framework for that. This time, things will change. I said in the first post something about CakePHP which is the one I selected for this application and probably more to come.
As Jonathan Snook says it so well:
I almost fear putting this kind of post together as it’s bound to pull the fanatics (in the negative sense of the word) out of the woodworks.So instead of giving a comparison of the available PHP MVC frameworks, I will instead list what I was looking for and believed CakePHP would cover. Here it is:
- Open Source / Free License
- KISS
OO and MVCORM / Active Record- Security
- Ajax interoperability
- Good controller structure
- Good helpers available
- Scaffolding
- Taking a look at ten different PHP frameworks, by Dennis Pallett
- CodeIgniter vs. CakePHP, by Jonathan Snook
- New Year’s Benchmarks and A Bit About Benchmarks, by Paul M. Jones
- Glue vs. Full Stack and More framework fun, by Chris Hartjes
- Comparing Frameworks, by Tim Bray