Lets put it this way: I am no web developer, nor was I ever, nor will I ever be. While I do enjoy playing around with various web designs and web technologies, I’m no web developer. Think about it, this blog is based upon the WordPress system, which means, that while I could easily build my own blog system – I didn’t.As most developers are, I am a lazy person – when it comes to writing code, that is. This means that when I write an application, I really like spending my time working on the application logic, rather than wasting my time on GUI. I’ve always looked for better ways to improve my applications development track, especially, the ability to seperate the logic from the display in such a way that both become agnostic to one another. So, I started looking into various MVC (Model-View-Controller) frameworks – which had been springing up all over the past year.
While the most popular one seems to be Ruby-On-Rails, I don’t like Ruby and prefare PHP. Various options exist here, so I seeked one that was easy to integrate and that is backed by a company of some sort.
Zend Framework
Much like PHP, Zend Framework appears to be a mixture of functions, closely wrapped into a set of classes, to help you create an MVC environment. I’ve started learning it, and shortly came to a conclusion: much like PHP, Zend Framework enables you a feature rich environment, however, it isn’t always clear how to get to do something with it.
CakePHP
CakePHP appears to be a slightly more rigid PHP MVC environment, with a fairly vibrant and lively community backing it up. However, like any other young community backed project, it lacks one main element: proper documentation. The documents available on the CakePHP.org website are sketchy at best, which means, there is no ordered manner of getting started fast with CakePHP.
Code Igniter
Code Igniter is a PHP MVC environment, backed by Ellis Labs – the same people behing Expression Engine. So, from a technical point of view, this is a plus, as Ellis Labs had made it its business to make Code Igniter a valid product. The amount of information available on the Internet is satisfactory, and the documentation on the website is more than good – it’s down right GREAT! The addition of video tutorials with a very clear naration enables even a novice developer to go about and start working fast with Code Igniter. The one thing that Code Igniter lacks is a rigid framework, which means, that just like PHP – it’s easy to fuck about and mess things up.
My Choice
Currently, I use a mixture of Code Igniter + Prototype + XAJAX to build my web applications, which makes for a fairly rapid development environment – I’d love to hear what you have to say about these.