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.
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
This is a smart post, man. Thanks
Agree with the author. Don’t keep changing tools. Just be perfectly familiar with one tool and make most of it!
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we should be shutting out any new technology. For example, I started out with CakePHP and loved it. But then I also started learning Ruby on Rails. There’s no denying that there is a vast following, so someone must be doing something right.
But, this branching out for me was solely about growth as a Web Developer, rather than trying to pin point the “Perfect Framework”.