Framework or not?

vronsky

Dear friends,
it's 12 years now that i have subscribed to this forum... in all these years really PHP has given me a job! Thanks also to the help of this community.
Now i am supposed to be a senior developer and it is fot this that i would ask a questions to all you.

I am on the way to begin a new e-commerce project.
I know about all the most important open source e-commerce programs on the market from OSCart to Magento.

Magento is based on Zend framework and it is supposed to be the most solid rock in the panorama... but it is so complicated, so slow, it need so many memory resources, the path of files is really a pain... against it is quite elastic to be themed and quite well documented.

It will be more simple to give up all the complications of Magento and write a new from scratch writing only the code you really need.

But if i think to all the f* crud operatins i should do if i rewrite from scratch... it make me sick.

So, maybe I install some ORM tool, like Propel or Doctrine. Yes, there i have the objects, but the forms?

So, why do not install a lighter framework that have a minimum helper to write forms less suck and more quick. But all the light products look at the end so light...

maybe use Cake...

but if i use Cake why do not use Zend, native on Magento??

So it is slow, so it have terrible paths and so on...

laserlight

Moved to General Help

What tools are the members of your team familiar with?

dalecosp

Another question to consider would be customization versus configuration over the long term.

Does the software product you're considering using allow you to configure it to do the things you may want to add in the future?

OR, will you have to customize it, add mods, etc. ?

Lastly, IF you DO customize it, will you be able to upgrade the underlying software without having to recreate all your customizations?

sneakyimp

I don't have much experience with OSCart or Magento. I do have experience with osCommerce, which is poorly written and has lots of features most organizations never use. The presence of these additional features makes it harder for users to understand. Whether to use one of these existing commerce projects as your basis depends mostly on a few things:
1) how smart are the users and developers working on the project. Do they know how to use it already?
2) if the users are not smart, you probably want to create something easier for them to use.
3) does the framework do what you want or will you need to customize it?
4) if the framework is too complex or requires a lot of modifications, does the client have the budget to pay for the changes?

Depending on what answers you get to those questions, you start to get a better idea of what is going to work. Folks with no budget have no choice but to use some existing framework because there is simply no time to build anything custom. For unique projects with a substantial budget, I always prefer a custom-built system but I might make use of a light framework. I'm partial to Codeigniter. For real-life projects, the answer usually lies somewhere in between and one must make an assessment as best one can. I once built a project on top of phpBB. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Today, I regret it. Another project was originally built on Joomla which is not so bad and has some useful features.

Vronsky wrote:
But if i think to all the f* crud operatins i should do if i rewrite from scratch... it make me sick.

This made me laugh. I agree that writing SQL for crud is a total drag. If you want to avoid writing simple insert or update statements with raw sql object, I'd strongly recommend abstracting DB access somehow. We've had a pretty involved but informative exchange of ideas on that in this thread. It's totally possible to do db inserts, updates, fetching, and deletion without writing SQL at all.