NYCPHP Meetup

[Ajai Khattri]

On Sun, 23 Aug 2009, lists at nopersonal.info wrote:

> I've just purchased my first book on PHP Object-Oriented Programming and
>  have also been looking at all the frameworks that abound. I'm unsure of
> where to go from here.

[snip]

> Would CodeIgniter fit the bill? I have no idea how to judge which
> framework might be best for me, and don't want to waste time learning
> one that I'm going to outgrow 12 months from now. Should I even be
> thinking about frameworks at this point, or would I be better off
> reading through & understanding the OOP book first?

I think many of us have come to that same fork in the road when making the 
move into frameworks. When I got into frameworks, I did read books on PHP 
OOP (the No Starch book is good). Since most frameworks use OOP and since 
they show no sign in going away, it is well worth reading up on OOP. Also, 
a book on design patterns probably would be useful too.

As to what framework is good, that is a very subjective question. But with 
your newly acquired OOP knowledge you will be in a much better place to 
judge how they work and which ones you're comfortable with. Basically, the 
best thing to do would be to look at a tutorial/demo for each one, follow 
each one, work through and see which one makes the most sense for *you*. 

Other things to consider: how much documentation is there? are they easy 
to read? are there any books? what are the mailing lists like? how active 
is development of the framework? in short, how good is the community 
around the framework?

Im not going to recommend any single one but Zend, CakePHP and symfony are 
pretty popular. When I made my choice, it was the excellent documentation 
and community that helped me decide.



-- 
Aj.