I love Spyce ( http://spyce.sourceforge.net ), it gives you the rapid development advantages of a very high level scripting language, but still retains the full control that comes with using a programming langauge and not a framework.

Used wisely, custom tags should give you a lot of the same rapid development speed of frameworks but without compromising control.

As for Cake? PHP is awful for anything large-scale (or of nearly any scale, really) and I wouldn”t even bother trying to understand it.

If it’s such a bad language for large-scale applications, why is it, Yahoo, IBM and many other companies use it. When a major myspace style app went from JAVA to PHP, they fixed the scalability issues they couldn’t seem to get right with Java.

Since you’re a JAVA guy, you shouldn’t obviously be posting about how bad PHP is, since you’re not using the language and tend to be biased.

A nod also to James Bennett for commentary on Django and it’s documentation (yes, I might just go with with Django over all of the other frameworks).

In response to James’

What is new, what”s driving all this sudden interest…

I think the answer is Web2.0, or more precisely (and without the cruft), that web programming is struggling towards it’s second generation. Maybe the pundits think that we’re somewhere beyond Web2G already, but that’s simply not true. Developing for the web demands that we integrate the needs of graphic designers (with little or no knowledge of web design), as well as end users and clients across multiple platforms and programming languages; to a degree not seen in traditional software development. Our customers need it now. They need it to meet their expectations. But more importantly they need it delivered to a timescale and cost budget that competes in the same market as their web-host (all you can host for £0.33 per month).

Getting the job done does, or very shortly will, demand that you deliver cleaner, more secure code, on tighter deadlines, and at lower cost than ever before. The payoff for coders, if they pick the right tools for the job, are more time spent on really developing instead of re-hashing the same code over and over.

Frameworks are, in my view, the (sometimes painful) attempts of the coder-designer-customer triangle to evolve into a second-generation of web-development.

Realistically we’re not quite there yet, but I have a feeling that in a couple of years frameworks will become the next generation of web coding. Ubiquitous. Removing the need to generate all code manually, and with much more flexibility than we see now.

Maybe this is pure BS, but it might happen. That’s the joy of being a programmer – what comes next!

Seriously I have some of the same complaints with frameworks. The thing is that, at least in my case, it really isn’t a problem with the frameworks themselves so much, as it is with their accompanying documentation which is written to a large extent as if you already know 1) how to use it, 2) its inner workings and 3) oh yes you need t do this first, etc. I have found this to be increasingly the case since (and call me old fashioned if you will) the demise of printed documentation and manuals. For example the last incarnation of Borland’s PASCAL product came with about 10 printed manuals. It was easy to find things, they were readily cross referenced and could be plunked (several if necessary) open on a desk for easy reference. They disappeared to reduce costs/price (though notice prices didn’t decrease)

Then again the first programming language I learned over thirty years ago was Ten Statement FORTRAN. :) And as I once had the indescribable experience of having to learn and spend a year using APL via a DECWriter terminal I am in some circles now considered beyond hope. :) And to clinch it I actually LIKE using ADA :)

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Eric, you mention that you “wrote all of An Event Apart”s registration stuff using PHP and MySQL.” I take this to mean that you did it once. Imagine if you did it three times, or five times, or fifty times — for different clients, with minor variations. Imagne how sick you’d be of re-implementing the same core features over and over. Your approach would change a little bit with each job, as you discovered better ways to implement certain features. Imagine the nightmare of trying to support all those clients — each one using a slightly different snapshot of your learning process.

Now imagine how much you’d appreciate pre-written software that took care of the common pieces for you, allowing you to focus on the variations. That’s what frameworks are about.

These people that use “OPERATIN SYSTUMS” er “GOOEY TOOLKITS” are too slimy by half. Give me an awl and some cardboard and I’ll give you a calculator program that’ll outperform his GOOEY web based spreadsheet ANY TIME OF THE DAY.

Byte Me,
Mel (you should read my story)