Drupal Competes As a Framework, Unofficially 178
tgeller writes "Drupal developer Ben Buckman attended the BostonPHP Framework Bake-Off with the hopes of pitting the CMS against CakePHP, Symfony, Zend, and CodeIgniter. He was told that he couldn't because Drupal is 'not a framework,' a response he felt was 'coder-purist snobbery ("it's not a framework if you build any of it in a UI").' So he decided to unofficially compete in the back of the room by accepting the challenge of building a job-posting app in 30 minutes, while the official competitors did the same from the stage. He recorded the results, which are impressive. In the process he raised the question: What is a framework, anyway?"
Steak (Score:5, Insightful)
I’d call Drupal a tool with a framework for extending said tool rather than a straight framework.
Why? Just what my gut tells me. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter (save for contest qualification purposes I guess). Use what does the job for you.
It's a long way (Score:4, Insightful)
My experience with another large CMS/CMF taught me that maintenance costs (which have to be passed on to clients) really start to add up quickly with the behemoth-sized packages, if you have a very active client. And if you're developing a small site with Drupal, and think of yourself as a moderately technical person, I sincerely ask you why you're not using something like Processwire instead. The last three people I saw do this did it because Drupal was "what they knew." That's uh...interesting. Why not just learn several tools that can fit into a more flexible toolchain? Drupal has one heck of a footprint!
The summary mentions a GUI, so it's probably worth bringing up Django -- an otherwise all-code framework that comes with its own admin panel GUI already built.
Drupal is a pain (Score:4, Insightful)
You may be able to argue Drupal, or even Wordpress, are frameworks. Nevertheless, Drupal is a bear to work with, fickle, frustrating, and overly complex.
Perhaps for complex websites it's worth it, but I don't make complex websites. I make simple ones. The few times I tried to use Drupal to do so they became far from simple.
I'd rather code from scratch than use Drupal.
There are two sorts of PHP developers (Score:5, Insightful)
The first you don't hear much about, they know the language, its stengths and its limitations and simply use it because nothing else out there can compete.
Then you got the second kind, that will be fuming at the last bit in the previous paragraph. They are forced to use it for some reason, mostly because the latest language they wish to use simply isn't supported enough. Personally, I think these are the lesser developers, the bad photographers who think if only they get a Hasselblad they will turn into a top class photographer instead of having to use this cheapo poloraid that nobody could ever possibly use to make art.
Personally I also think frameworks are silly. If you can lash up a site in 30 minutes, then the request simply isn't distinctive enough. Your site will be the Xth among thousands and fail. For the next job board site, you need to add something new, do it different, improve the process/experience else the monsterboards will simply keep the position they got.
If a wizard can write your code, you are not a developer but an assembly line worker. Granted there is a living to made at this, but please, don't call yourself a developer, you are a code monkey.
It is amusing for me to see the developers that every problem they encounter, they say: Oh if only we used tech X, this would be easy... WAY to sell your talent kiddo. It is even more amazing to see when they get away with it. Companies running everything from PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails, ASP and god knows what else, in the same company and in one extreem case, the same site... I don't care how much you hate an individual language, more then one you need a BLOODY good reason, more then two and you are insane.
But hey, keep looking for the magical language that no longer requires you to express yourself to achieve what you want. If people could write amazing code in assembly then why can't you make the language the project uses just work?
Really, if you claimed that you would be a better driver if only you had a proper car, every real driver would laugh at you. Instant poloroids are used by the pro's. Some serious art is produced with nothing but paper and charcoal.
But for a website, you need the latest tech so you can never learn all its secrets. Right.
Re:There are two sorts of PHP developers (Score:3, Insightful)
> Personally I also think frameworks are silly. If you can lash up a site in 30 minutes, then the request simply isn't distinctive enough.
Let me first point out that I agree with most of what you say (which is essentially that the value of a programmer is in solving problems which have not already been solved), however:
The entire point of a framework is to give you the underlying repetitive parts so you can focus on coding the complicated domain specific pieces later.
Frameworks and libraries are everywhere. In fact, many people judge the quality of a language by the quality of the libraries they have.