In the era when everybody’s going mad about Object Oriented Programming and when on everybody’s lips you can see how the term MVC is taking more and more shape we thought that a different opinion may be usefull for those who don’t know where to go or what to choose. From our point of view the idea behind everything it is one built from the essence of logic and sounds like this: you have to stay close to those technologies that are giving you what you need to do your job or to create your cutting-edge project. Everything that it’s making your life easier and it’s transforming you in a more efficient and creative developer it’s good for you. I know that you already know this but our advice is to go back to the essence because many developers nowadays are lost in the huge frameworks forest that are already available out there. We are not against them but let us assume this: We want to build custom solutions for small and medium businesses what is the best framework for us? Which one suits better this project? Which one can save us time and therefore money? Hmm, good questions. Before you start googling you should ask some more questions, this is our advice. Question like: If you want to build custom solutions why you would need an already full of features framework? Don’t you think that if it’s custom than you should let it be custom? The ideea is what do you want to do and what do you expect from your framework. We choose like this: if it’s simple, fast, efficient and secure than it’s for us because we like to develop our applications, because we like to code, because we like to build those custom solutions (different customers have different needs) and that will be our choice. For us, at this point in time, if we don’t build everything from scratch, because it’s simple and efficient, CodeIgniter it’s absolutely ok. I am pretty sure Symfony and CakePHP maybe would do the same job great but in our eyes CodeIgniter is the simplest, has the smallest footprint and also has a good speed. There’s always place for improvement. Also it’s being recognized by almost everybody that CodeIgniter has the fastest learning curve which gives us the possibility to solve different other problems when it’s about training.
The next framework on our list, when it’s about learning, is Symfony and after that CakePHP and on the last place Zend Framework. The first framework used by us was CakePHP and after that we jumped for a while, for some test projects, to Zend Framework and Symfony. The last one was CodeIgniter and we are still using it. Why? Because it ticks our boxes. We do not exclude any of this four biggest PHP Frameworks, what we say is that you must find the framework that fits your needs and/or build your own.
Read More in Part II