Blog
Recently I watched a video presentation of Rasmus Lerdorf at Drupalcon 2008. In the presentation he gives a good argument against using PHP Frameworks. All of his point sum up to a lack of speed and efficiency. However we are talking about a fraction of a second and for the most of my projects it's not an issue.
First I want to say why I prefer to use a PHP Framework. While going to school I learned the benefits of using Model-View-Controller (MVC). For a while I was using my own simplied version of it and created my own framework. However after each project I would make some improvement tweaks to my custom framework. This became an issue because now I had a handful of projects with a lack consistency in directory structures and class files. I set my self up so that I had to re-learn my own framework each time it was time to make a simple edit.
I have heard about Zend Framework for a while and decided to give it a try. Since January of this year (2008) I've been using the ZF for all my projects. Even for those simple five page sites that could have been created using static html pages. However my goal was to increase my overall workflow and develop a plug and play system that works for me. For the most part Zend Framework did help speed up my workflow. However there was a bit of a learning curve exploring their api's and running into typical shared web hosting issues. The two most benefical things I gained from using the framework was consistency through out all my projects and learning about mod rewrite (aka - pretty URL's).
I will admit the Zend Framework does feel a bit bloated and I only use about 20% of it's library. In addition to that there is a ridiculous amount of files in the directory. The entire library is only about 12 Megs yet it's taken me up to an hour to upload to a share web hosting server. I'm currently using 1and1 web hosting and ZF tends to run ok... however I've seen some serious lag time on GoDaddy's shared web hosting.
After watching Rasmus presentation I decided that perhaps ZF is little too much for my needs. I still prefer to use a framework but something a little more bare bones. Even though Rasmus is against all frameworks he did mentioned
that CodeIgniter seemed to be the best.
The other day I finally downloaded CI and gave it a try... OMG this framework kicks ass. Here's a few points at first glance...
* Don't have to touch the bootstrapper
* Configuration files are set-up and ready to go - just put in your site info.
* Less learning curve to understand the framework
Zend Framework was created with more of an enterprise development team in mind. I think CodeIgniter is meant more for the average PHP / Web Developer. From what I've seen there are less files in the library
and everything is pre-configured to give a more plug & play.
I just finished uploading a small project experimenting with Adobe's Kuler API.
Check It Out
I have benefited so much from both the open source community and platform evangelists that I figured it was time for me to make my small contribution.
UPDATE: 6/7/08
I am still in the process of building the blog section of this site. Originally I planned on using the ubiquitous
WordPress Platform however the javascript functions in the admin section kept crashing in Safari 3 and Firefox 3.
In addition to that it I felt it had a hint of feature creep.
I enjoy building CMS from scratch so I figured I might as well do it here. At the same time it would give me a chance to experiment with a handful of idea's floating around in my head.
Until then my friends,
Isaac Gonzalez
