Everyone asleep?

hagen00

Hi,

I don't mean to be rude or anything or start a big flame, but after doing a search, there seems to be extremely little evidence of people here using PHP frameworks.

Why not? Do you like "spaghetti code"? Am I wrong? Are people using frameworks?

Have you looked at qcodo? It's a fantastic framework that really does make your life so much easier. No need to write the standard CRUD methods. It makes full use of the PHP5 features and is very much OO.

I also hope that people are aware that PHP developers are pretty much the laughing stock of people that work in Django and RoR and the like.

(I say screw them, but they often have a point).

Comments?

scrupul0us

well in case u hadnt noticed... this is PHPBuilder.. not PHPFrameworks

its a site for people who want to learn PHP and get help with scripting...

I don't mean to be rude or anything or start a big flame, but your post is irrelevant for this forum completely

as for people being the laughing stock by <insert stupid link here> we dont care... it takes people like US to become people like 'them'

hagen00

So are people like them more advanced than people like us? Are they getting it right and we're getting it wrong?

Is this really completely irrelevant to this forum? There are definitely not just beginners here, or have I got it wrong and this forum is mainly for beginners? This is one of the biggest PHP discussion forums out there, so if frameworks can't be discussed here, I wonder where?

scrupul0us

they can be discussed here but generally if you have a problem with a framework you take it to their forums

you can discuss what you will here, but you are right, there isnt an abundance of framework related discussion here

as for the "them" and "us"... i shouldn't have referred to the "community" as such, b/c in the end, "WE" are just that.. a community of developers

hagen00

Ok, i see. I suppose it's up to us to choose a suitable framework and then go to that particular forum. The Qcodo forum is lively enough.

I suppose I was just wanting to get some unbias input on frameworks (which one to use, why to use them, when not to use them, previous experience with frameworks, etc.) - since on each of the framework forums, the input is obviously not unbias.

scrupul0us

personally ive NEVER used a framework... most of the work I do (professionally) wouldnt benefit from a framework or at least not enough to reclaim the time setting up the server to handle it... im also not very strong with OOP...

i personally feel comfortable building my own "applications" from the ground up

veridicus

As a professional web developer I just don't find the need for any meaningful frameworks for PHP. When using Python (and when I tried Ruby) a framework was much more useful. But for PHP my team has a simple custom framework that we often use just to get the basics out of the way (user logins, clean URLs, etc) and everything after that is custom.

Sometimes we take something pre-built, like a CMS, and drastically customize it, so we don't built the site from scratch. But I don't consider that choosing a framework as much as customizing an application.

leatherback

Hi,

I have never used a framework, and -to be honest- am not sure what is meant.

From what I read from the sites you refer to it is not much more than OO programming and providing some form of interactive layer to build code.

I personally write my own functions, which I do not include into classes, as I find that each website have their on oddities. Instead, I build modules, which I reuse (e.g., user management, photo gallery, upload modules) which I can tap together in minutes, add customisation and build a new site in days, while keeping full control over my own code.

Laughing stock? Ah well. Let them laugh.

hagen00

Hi Leather

Yes, we too build modules that we then reuse. I.e. user management, photo gallery and so on. We just find that many of the sites we build require us to do the same mundane stuff over and over gain. Add/Edit/Delete and View. The classes that we've build then need to be tweaked slightly, i.e. call to a different database table, change/add a few fields to the SQL UPDATE and INSERT statements, etc. Really not rocket science and extremely mundante.

A framework like Qcodo generates all this from the datamodel. It looks at your tables and relationship and generates working INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and much much more for you. It's all there already, generated in very nice OO code. Even the datagrid views are there, pagination, ajax sorting, non ajax sorting. All there. What's left to the developer is customizing the look and feel and of course adding the specific business logic.

The way I see it, with a framework like Qcodo, we can cut the time of developing our sites by half, if not more.

Weedpacket

Moving this to a more appropriate forum.

Shrike

hagen00 wrote:
I also hope that people are aware that PHP developers are pretty much the laughing stock of people that work in Django and RoR and the like.

In most cases I find that people who don't have much of an understanding of something are the ones who laugh loudest. Not just in programming circles 🙂

stolzyboy

nope, no experience here...

in reality, once you have your functions to do your stuff (db conn, insert, update, delete, select, fetch results, sanitizer, etc...) and you set them up correctly, by passing in arguments, there is no need for a framework, you just pass your db info to the function, your queries to the appropriate function, etc...

i don't need a generator to do my work as i've done it once and that's enough

Roger_Ramjet

Well, I've been looking at frameworks just now, trying to figure which one to get to know and use. I just started to use ver 5 so all my code units are procedural/functional and due for a re-write anyway. So I might as well start with a framework since it is all new to me anyway. (I also just decided to go with Prototype rather than write my own AJAX tools and found it to be wonderful so I hope I'll have a similar experience with a php framework)

I was looking at Zend Framework, 0.9 is in Beta as of yesterday and 1.0 should be out by the end of March they announce: an alpha or less I presume but it's getting there. I searched here and there but can't find a lot of useful comment about adopting ZF any more than Hagen can find any useful comparisons between frameworks.

The plethora of rather useless and contradictory articles and examples on php patterns has left me floundering. I hope that using ZF will rather force me into the best practices cos I don't have 6 months to play with. At the least, reviewing the source as I use the tools should be valuable training which in itself would make using a framework worthwhile.

I'm going with ZF because of its strategic connections with IBM and the like, I suppose I'm gambling that it will become the commonplace for enterprise php which is just really starting to take off here in the UK. So unless someone has good reasons to change my opinion and adopt another framework that will be my choice.

ucdesemuscles

hagen00 wrote:
Hi Leather

Yes, we too build modules that we then reuse. I.e. user management, photo gallery and so on. We just find that many of the sites we build require us to do the same mundane stuff over and over gain. Add/Edit/Delete and View. The classes that we've build then need to be tweaked slightly, i.e. call to a different database table, change/add a few fields to the SQL UPDATE and INSERT statements, etc. Really not rocket science and extremely mundante.

A framework like Qcodo generates all this from the datamodel. It looks at your tables and relationship and generates working INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and much much more for you. It's all there already, generated in very nice OO code. Even the datagrid views are there, pagination, ajax sorting, non ajax sorting. All there. What's left to the developer is customizing the look and feel and of course adding the specific business logic.

The way I see it, with a framework like Qcodo, we can cut the time of developing our sites by half, if not more.

Yeah Qcodo is a great MVC framework!! It makes things so much easier, and the code is well organized. I encourage you guys to give it a try.

Weedpacket

hagen00 wrote:
...and of course adding the specific business logic.

Which is far and away the most difficult and tedious part of the whole process to begin with; the rest can be pretty much automated (oh, wait....). I want a framework that can take (constantly shifting) business requirements and automatically generate the db schema and user interface. That would save me work.

And let's not forget

customizing the look and feel

Because, oddly enough, a one-size-fits-all framework never quite fits. (I've used one PHP framework - quite a popular one - that requires the database connection parameters to be specified in four separate configuration files (in fact it's got almost as many configuration files as code files) and requires an additional database schema file which is used to construct the db access layer (so if you make any change to the database structure you have to make a corresponding change to the schema file).) I found it remarkably tedious (no, I don't want the pager to look like that! Oh, here, let me do it....) and the documentation - well, definitely reactive rather than proactive. "People keep asking about returning aggregated result sets from cross-table joins." "Stick something somewhere in the documentation about it."

stolzyboy wrote:
i don't need a generator to do my work as i've done it once and that's enough

I expect that the generators exist for (a) developers who lack the skill or experience to have already done it for themselves, and (b) for the benefit of the developers of the framework.

I feel a bit better, now.