Taking the Sting Out of PHP 5 Programming

bfioca writes "Where are the all-in-one PHP frameworks that make building well-factored and maintainable applications as easy as building simple sites? O'Reilly ONLamp's recent article Simplify PHP Development with WASP shows how to make a simple database-backed site with WASP in just a few lines of code. Other PHP 5 frameworks such as symfony and PRADO have been getting a lot of recent attention as well."

Re:Drupal?

[albalbo]

I think you have to hack it to get it to work multisite? Also, the URLs are pretty horrible.

That's not to say stuff like PRADO is any good either - I used it for a commercial site, and it's a pain to maintain. It's an ASP-style component system, and doesn't fit the web model - if you want to do 'Ajax', for example, you're screwed.

symfony looks interesting, though, and much more lightweight.

Re:Drupal?

[slashdotnickname]

We actually tested out Drupal for possibly doing a customer's portal site last year. It had a lot of features and was quick to set up, but it was a nightmare to customize it beyond anything simple. I think it's a great product for non-techies to get something up with, but it's too restrictive for any complex business logic needs.

Re:Drupal?

[WebCrapper]

Couldn't agree more.

In the long run, I would rather write my own CMS than use someone elses. When I first learned PHP, I wrote my own system. Now that I'm older and less stupid, I realize how many security holes where in the application, but in the 3 years I used it, not one hiccup because it wasn't documented anywhere.

I messed around with Mambo (sorta, kinda, like Drupal) and really didn't like it. I hacked it a little to do what I wanted, but found it wasn't for me.

At the same time, I'm a little at a loss. I'm currently writting an OSS application and while I know there will be security flaws, I'm stuck on what I want to do with the data. Do I encrypt everything, have the option of a global storage DB (my DB, not the one people install the application on), etc... Too many choices and they could all, somehow, become a security issue.

Re:Just use Ruby or Python

[varanid]

considering the forum in posting, I wouldn't be surprised if I was modded down, buut I signed up on slashdot finally just to make this my first post as a reply

while I agree its a niche language now, it won't be long I imagine till ruby ges more mainstream. The main thing holding ruby back so far has been a lack of books on the subject. hoowever, that is quickly changing and already ruby is more popular than python in japan.

caveat emptor: I've only been dabbeling in ruby for the past week or so

anyway, so far I rather like the language as it somehow manages to emain fairly concise yet readable unlike perl and as a language, I find it alot more powerful than php.

ruby + the rails network shhouldn't be dismissed just yet and php programmers would be wise to at least devote some time to learning ruby. I don't imain, assuming you knoow OOP, anyone would have much of a problem learning ruby, and it scales much better for large apps

note: I myself have used php extensivly in the past but I am now seriously considering going to ruby on rails as my nnew dev environment

Re:Drupal?

[truthsearch]

If you want to do anything beyond things that relate directly to content management then Drupal's not a great option. In theory you could strip out most of the module and use it as an app framework, but you won't get gaining too much over writing your own foundation. Drupal is mostly specific to CMS needs.

Stupid article, obfuscated and biased examples.

[Anonymous Coward]

This article appears to be written for fools. One of the author's examples of WASP's superiority is that this:

<li flexy:foreach="arTasks,key,task">{task[Name]} - <i>{task[Due]}</i></li>

is better than this:

  <?php
        $arTasks = array();
        foreach ($arTasks as $key => $task)
        {
  ?>
                <li><?php echo $task['Name']; ?> - <i><?php echo $task['Due']; ?></i></li>
  <?php
        }
  ?>

Because "Already you can see one of the biggest benefits of working with WASP: no need for embedded PHP code."

Well, it might look that way, because he deliberately coded the PHP version in the messiest way possible. He could have simply done this:

<? foreach ($arTasks as $key=>$task) { echo '<li>' . $task['Name'] . '-<i>' . $task['Due'] . '</i></li>'; } ?>

The WASP sample doesn't look so much better now, does it? Not so much so that it's worth downloading some unknown framework and inheriting someone else's bugs and execution overhead and security holes?

Re:Just use Ruby or Python

[danharan]

There are a lot more Ruby developers than Ruby jobs.

And they tend to be better developers too, those that enjoy hacking and being productive.

Re:Modern web programmers have moved elsewhere

[GigsVT]

Excellent post.

I have read the tutorials for Ruby on Rails and some of the PHP frameworks that rip it off. It seems like a hell of a lot of work just to avoid writing a few lines of code.

We are developing a CRUD-only framework at work, sort of in homage to this current fad, but ours won't be OO, and it won't keep you from having to write code either. It sure as hell won't use XML for anything. We might release it as free software after we see how well it works out.

I don't know why all these framework sites talk about how much fun it is to develop with their framework. What ever happened to being maintainable or scalable or even useful? "Fun" isn't a quality I generally look for in my programming tools.