A Path Less Taken

My latest experiment is building a new site without leveraging one of the many MVC Frameworks that are out there today. I decided to approach a new project using the following criteria:

• Simple can be better sometimes.
• Frameworks don’t do EVERYTHING well.
• Components that do one job and do it well are easier.
• Easier can be more productive.

To be fair, my results were a mixed bag, but so far I’m happy with the experiment. The site is not open to the public yet, but you can check out the current version here if you are curious how it is going. Below is a brief out line of the tools I used and the results (good, bad and ugly)!

One thing I love about the open source community is all you need is another motivated, talented programmer with an opinion and change happens. I just found another new PHP Framework that has waded into the fray (at least from my perspective). It’s call DOOPHP and it has an interesting take on magic methods. The author’s contention on the about page is that magic methods rob frameworks of performance. I don’t know if that’s worth building a new solution over, but it could be worth a look. Enjoy.

Before you post a comment that says something like “there’s a Kohana 3 module that does that” let me just say I know and I’m grateful for it. Some of what I did was inspired by that module. The issue was when I tried getting the Kohana 3 unittest module to work to test my module it was giving me problems. I read the Kohana forum posts and the unittest documentation and could not find an answer. Finally I decided to start at the beginning and set up PHPUnit manually to work with Kohana 3 and my module to debug what I was doing wrong with unittest. In the process I discovered that getting PHPUnit to work with Kohana 3 wasn’t that hard after all. I thought I would share my solution in the event you are having similar issues.

What follows is a list of PHP Frameworks that are actively supported based on a VERY cursory review by the author. Please feel free to provide any comments or feedback that would help improve this list. It is mainly intended for my reference, but I hope that it might be helpful to you. The content is primarily the BIG frameworks or the interesting one’s. Interesting is defined here as attempting to fill some niche that larger frameworks either don’t address or don’t adequately address.

I’ve been doing more programming than blogging and that’s a good thing. I decided to take a brief time out and share some links to a few PHP Micro Frameworks. Micro Frameworks (as far as I can tell) are like regular frameworks, only they are smaller. They try to provide fewer features, but provide them really well. I have not tired any of these yet, but I list them here for your reference and mine.