Frameworks…

We at Nu Order Webs use a few different methods of creating sites – normally depending on the amount of specific customisation that is needed. Often if a simple CMS site is needed we will either use Joomla or Wordpress, but quite often a client will require something really specific that cannot currently be done using open source software. That is where a framework comes in! Our Framework of choice is CakePHP, we find it’s strong typing and ease of data passing a huge benefit when it comes to rapidly creating applications, not to mention the huge prototyping benefits given from using bake.

However looking at the current market, there are a lot more job offers asking for the Zend Framework. Now personally I have never got on with the Zend framework, I think it is overly simple and doesnt actually seem to provide any “Automagic” features, and surely the whole point of a framework is that it prevents you having to write an excessive amount of code?

Sure they have a fantastic “library” of pre-written code for web services, but one of the benefits of cakePHP is that you can simply import these and instantiate them as you would with any other object. For instance on a previous project we simply used the Zend libraries for google picasa to import a photo album from the users picasa account in roughly about 30 lines of code.

So I would say – don’t always follow the crowd, sure Zend has the backing of the creators of PHP but as an MVC framework designed for RAD – I would suggest that possibly there are better choices out there – especially when it comes to code generation!