To framework or not to Framework

[deeman_prog]

I'm currently working on a large web based internal operations system for a company. It's all mission critical and the system is so massive it'll probably take our team several years to do everything. It's all AJAX driven to give it more of an "application" feel.

However there has been some controversy between developers, some that think we should be using a framework and other that don't.

I would like to hear people’s opinions and reasons to justify it.

[ixalmida]

I'd say it depends on how you weigh rapid development versus fine-tuning and control. You say you have several years and apparently more than one developer, so I'd wager that time crunch isn't the driving factor. But I guess I'd want to see the scope of the project before I decide.

I single-handedly produced the service management system for my company in 3 months (mostly 70-80 hour weeks). Six months later, and one added intern, we're about to publish "phase 2", which is a real-time scheduling piece, along with some fancy added functionality, including a web-service update and integration to a third-party database system.

Ajax shouldn't be a big factor. Once you get the basic Javascript functions written in a fairly-reusable way, it's merely a matter of adding the back-end code which you'd have to write anyway. I have several long forms on my site that are all Ajax-driven. Service technicians pull up a mobile page and can time-stamp various steps of their process in real-time by simply pressing buttons. Those pages really didn't take that long to build.