After reading about Matt’s Experience with the Zend Framework, I came to the conclusion that one’s choice of a Web Development Framework doesn’t really matter. There are tons of frameworks out there and there’s a good reason for that. People still use them. If no one used a framework it would die a quick and painless death. Different frameworks offer different benefits to different people.
However, I’m willing to bet that First Choice is one of the main factors affecting a developer’s choice of framework. I fell into CakePHP first because I had an initial choice of CakePHP and Code Igniter. I couldn’t quite get CI working quickly enough, so I jumped on CakePHP and I’ve been here ever since.
Something else which solidifies the First Choice method is that the frameworks are sufficiently different that there is a learning curve when moving from one to the other. If you’ve started using one framework effectively, learning another (even to discover potential benefits) is usually not worth the time.
So I say this to you; be confident in your choice of a web development framework. Code Igniter, CakePHP, Symphony, even Ruby on Rails, it doesn’t matter and no one cares as long as you can crank out functional web applications in a reasonable amount of time.
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And see, I did kinda the same thing you did. I started on Cake, but the tutorial didn’t work (I was using a new beta version at the time or something), and I can’t bear to use an old version of a piece of software. I had similar problems with Xajax, using the beta .5 version, but at least got that working.
I moved to Zend, and got a couple of test apps up and running, but realized that it took me twice as long as if I had coded it by hand.
My decision for now is to stick with doing it myself. I understand how it works, I can make changes where I want when I want and how I want, and it really doesn’t take me much more time to write a few SQL statements, or assign better named variables to $_POST[] and so on.
Once there aren’t articles and blogs all over the place trying to figure out which of the 10 available frameworks are the best/better/usable/pointless, I’m sure I’ll switch over. Until then, I’ll keep my focus on making sure I know HTML5 before the mainstream does, and eagerly waiting PHP6…q
Daniel Costalis, on April 22nd, 2008 at 12:14 pm
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