Friday, March 27, 2009

Talking about php frameworks

I am thinking of updating my blog. Here is the thing: I can do more productive stuff than searching for good looking blogger templates.. Although I am an advocate of simple looking text oriented blogs, but still, I hate the restricted and limited blogger dashboard whenever I think of tweaking the layout somehow.

Anyways, a geek friend talked about cakePHP. I looked it up and it seems interesting. The last time I worked with PHP, there was no hype of php frameworks, and perhaps the only one I heard about was by Zend. So, anyways, this world of frameworks is ranked here. By having a couple of sneak peaks at Yii-powered sites, I declare it to be boring to try out.. Next, I've got CodeIgnitor, CakePHP, and Akelos.

On the other hand, I've got RubyOnRails!

Now, I've worked with PHP and it's the easiest language I've worked with by far (considering the compiled languages I know). I wouldn't be comfortable to work with a framework that might make the whole process as easy as a cake (from cakePHP) and at the same time I am thinking to stick to php and do more practical things with it instead of trying out something new like Ruby.

So, I'll think :) One stupid way of comparison is the time it takes to make a blog with these frameworks: RoR takes 15 minutes, and CodeIgnitor and Akelos take 20 minutes :p For more intelligent comparative analysis, I'll look around for resources. I am planning to export all my posts from this blog to my new blog (I don't know how this work though) ..

5 comments:

Monis Iqbal said...

What goes around comes around.
I remember you hyped about PHP and building a multi-blog site as a side project. It seems like you still possess the same thinking, this time doing it for your own blog.
It should be a good initiative, however keep one thing in mind when looking into different frameworks and that is to extract out the strengths or the unique concepts put forward by the framework or the intuition upon which the framework is based upon. Because it is these innovative ideas that drive the upbringing of new frameworks.
e.g. Spring came up as a lightweight alternative to the all too complex J2EE world.
Guice based on the DI theme with new tricks in the market although we already had Spring, Pico at that time.
Rails eliminated the configuration mess that we Java folks have become so used to.
Lift based on FP power.
Last but not the least, C2JSA built on the intuitions provided by GOF :)
Let's see whats your take on PHP frameworks. Good luck once again.

Salman Jamali said...

@Monis

Do u also remember that I had a problem with extra white spaces in my source codes? Guess what, I still couldn't get rid of them :D

Anyways, thanks for the insights! Btw, I am more into my thesis nowadays, and it's getting interesting day by day :) We'll talk about it someday.

Monis Iqbal said...

@jamali yes I remember. Maaz (in my team) also had the same problem. I criticized him so much that now he codes with 'Show whitespaces' on.

I cannot get over the problem of ur put-space-btw-everything breed :)

Israa said...

I happen to stumble upon your blog and found your php framework post interesting since I'm using one right know. Its called 'Kohana'; its a fork off of CodeIgniter and was recommended to me by a friend for a project I'm working on for one of my classes. If you find you've got a lot of time on your hands at some point check it out, their documentation could be a lot better but they have a lot of functionality that CodeIgniter that doesn't have.

Unknown said...

There is a really informative post about PHP framework. It's really very informative for me. Thanks for sharing this info with us.

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