Slashdot Mirror
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?"
One tool to rule them all: Assembly.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
If you have an existing base of PHP and Ruby developers then Cake sounds like the way to go to meet them both in the middle so everyone can pick it up fairly quickly. Cake is based on many of the same concepts as Ruby on Rails so everyone should be fairly at home. It is still PHP though so it won't force all your dev team to write better code as much as RoR will. The flexibility of a PHP base can be a plus though unless it is put in the wrong hands.
http://cakephp.org/
Personally I am struggling through my first Zend Framework Project at the moment but I am not sure I would recommend it as it has caused me a few too many frustrations. I do worry that this will just knock all the other PHP Frameworks into the long grass though as it is by the same people as PHP. I am starting to see quite a few job offers coming my way now I have added Zend Framework to my CV so it does seem to be very popular for some reason.
I just noticed you also mention having a Python powered backend, this may change my advice above but it does bring about another question: Do you really need so many different technologies? Surely this must drive up your costs considerably as you need developers with a much wider skill set or more of them.
I dont read
Sure. And a chisel can be used as a screwdriver.
Why not stay with Symfony 1.4? It's a mature and well-supported framework. We have been playing with Symfony2 ourselves at my current job, but decided to keep using 1.4 until the formgenerators of Symfony2 are a bit more mature.
Of all the php-frameworks i've worked with, Symfony 1.4 still makes me most productive.
I couldn't disagree more. Cake is loaded with deeply awkward black magic and bad practices. Not to mention the fallacy that the model layer is the orm (hint: in the rest of the world it is not). Cake is second on my list of frameworks to avoid (and most senior developers that I know agree). I would suggest you do the same. .
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
Agreed. Frameworks are nice, but I'm finding them to be very very very overused. Take a minute and really look at your project. Does it actually need a framework? Does the use of a framework save enough time in development to justify the additional overhead? If so, is that because you (or the people working on it) have been taught frameworks as opposed to learning actual programming (laugh if you want, I've met far to many people who know a bunch of frameworks, but couldn't write the most basic raw code if their lives depended on it), or because it actually streamlines the development process? The majority of the projects I've worked on haven't actually benefited in any way from the use of a framework when they've been properly evaluated. Not saying yours is the same, but make sure you take a good, long, objective look at it before you decide on something. My $.02, take it or leave it.
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!
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:
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).
There isn't an easy answer. All frameworks are great at getting you 80% done then make the last 20% nearly impossible.
What you know best is properly the right thing to use as long as it's capable of getting the job done and you can still find new staff who have some knowledge of it.