NYCPHP Meetup

[Mitch Pirtle]

On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 11:18 AM, Ajai Khattri<ajai at bitblit.net> wrote:
> Im not going to recommend any single one but Zend, CakePHP and symfony are
> pretty popular. When I made my choice, it was the excellent documentation
> and community that helped me decide.

Wise words - and based on Bev's design background I'm going to also
mention Silverstripe, which is a CMS built upon the Sapphire
framework. What makes Silverstripe unique from the usual suspects is
that it goes into a page-centric design approach, meaning you write
page templates for different types of content. Probably would feel
completely natural to someone coming over from design and production.

Ultimately you have different types of frameworks to choose from, with
specific characteristics:

* glue frameworks - like Zend and Joomla 1.5, glue frameworks allow
you to glue together just the stuff you need to get things done. They
are known to scale and perform very well, as you only incur
performance hits for code you actually use. They also promote a Do It
Yourself (DIY) attitude, as you ultimately decide what legos you
choose to stack, and how to stack them.
* stack frameworks - like CakePHP and Symfony, stack frameworks are
the whole enchilada, providing developers with a rich suite of
features to rapidly prototype. Stacks are usually fastest for
prototyping and throwing code together, but are known to be more
difficult than glue frameworks to customize to specific needs. Some
say scale and performance are also issues, however your mileage may
vary ;-)

I like both styles of frameworks for different reasons, and there are
emerging projects like Kohana (really cool!) and Silverstripe/Sapphire
that have modern approaches. Both merit a serious gander, IMHO.

As long as you pick one (or three) of these frameworks to play with,
you will be forced in one way or another to make the leap into OO
programming. The old Sitepoint books (PHP Anthology) and PHP5 Power
Programming were good books for getting an understanding of solid OO
practices.

-- Mitch