Ask Slashdot: One Framework To Rule Them All?

New submitter ittybad writes "I work with a small web-based company, and, for some new web applications, we are looking to possibly change frameworks if it will be a benefit to our developers and our customers. We have experience with PHP's Symfony 1.4, and are not happy with what we are experiencing with Symfony 2.0. We have some Ruby guys who would love us to implement a Ruby on Rails solution, and our backend is Python powered — so maybe Django is the way to go. So, I ask you, Slashdotters, what web framework do you find to be the best and why? Why would you avoid others?"

Comments

Don't use Cake. Try Yii instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't use Cake. There's limited support for actually getting back true objects with their ORM, which means you can't really deal with an intelligent data object. I did a lot of heavy research on the subject last year for my web company and found that Yii Framework (http://www.yiiframework.com) really fit my sweet spot well.

My legacy code is/was all in PHP (up to 8 years of code), but I wanted the flexibility and advantages of a good object based, MVC system that I could fit over top of my legacy code and upgrade as I had time (without having to do an entire rewrite of the code from scratch).

If you mainly do small one-offs that don't require much ongoing work / maintenance, then either RoR or Django would work fine. But if you already have a sizable code base, the benefits of using a framework in the same language is noticeable. I keep finding new things I can do with Yii after a year that make me faster and faster. Haven't run into any needs that haven't already been planned for in the framework (compared to CFWheels, a Coldfusion Ruby-on-Rails clone I've been switching a client to, that while quite thorough, does have limitations I'm already hitting after a week). And the Yii forum is quite active and seems to have steady readership and input from the main committers. So wrinkles with the framework get resolved on a timely basis. It's been a joy coding in.

Good luck!

Re:Drupal

[mouf]

Actually, when looking for a framework, having a look at Drupal is not that stupid. I must admit I have a love-hate relationship with Drupal. It comes with a set of restrictions, but you have a website out-of-the-box to start quickly: a nice templating engine, an easy way to add static pages, a way to manage users... and it has several thousands available module to easily add functionalities, which is unprecedented

Now, in my opinion, the real problem with Drupal is that it does not rely on the MVC pattern, and most developers are used to that. Also, it is not object-oriented!

At my place, we have developed an MVC framework that we can plug to Drupal. This way, we get the benefit of Drupal and all its modules, and when it comes to pure PHP development, we have a nice MVC framework instead of those bloody Drupal hooks. If you want to have a look:

• The Mouf framework
• The MVC module
• Drupal integration

It is released as open-source, it is functional, but documentation is not complete yet so I would not recommend using it until we finish the documentation (probably in January).