NYCPHP Meetup

[Brian D.]

- How do you deal with quickly-morphing PHP frameworks when some
applications tend to stay in production for years at a time?
- Do any of you have a good experience with a framework that ages well?

As others have pointed out, the more abstracted a given foundation is,
the faster it changes. C code pretty much works the same way it did 10
years ago. PHP 5.3 is quite a bit different than the PHP3 code I wrote
years ago. Frameworks (I've used Zend and CakePHP) change even faster
- the code I wrote last year for Cake or Zend is quite a bit different
than the code I write today.

This causes an issue with applications that have a long life-span.
They age very poorly. You basically have two choices:
1. Upgrade your application to fit new framework API changes. This
leads to an inordinate amount of time upgrading, which means less time
you can devote to actually improving the application itself. You're
stuck upgrading existing functionality broken by new upgrades. In my
experience, frameworks tend to be brittle.
2. Don't upgrade. You may miss out on security fixes or new
functionality. You may even have to patch the framework code to fix
security issues without breaking other functionality, which means now
you have undocumented changes. Documentation for past frameworks may
even be difficult to find (assuming it's even online).

How do you guys handle this?

- Brian
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