Datasheet

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING SYMFONY, CAKEPHP, AND ZEND FRAMEWORK

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For producing consecutive apps, in which modularity and reusability of pieces of code like

controllers and views may be helpful

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For real-world development with deadlines, rotating staff, and ﬁ tful customers

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If you are, or want to be, a professional web developer, so learning how to work with frame-

works is not an excessive effort

As you can see, this applies to most commercial web applications that connect to a database and

allow its users to create and modify its content. Therefore, programming with web app frameworks

becomes a standard and common practice in the web development world.

Disadvantages

When you should consider development without any frameworks at all:

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Purely informative web pages without user-created content, for example an artist’s portfolio

with fancy graphics

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Small projects with limited database connection that wouldn’t beneﬁ t much from frame-

works’ code generation

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R eally big projects that additionally need extreme performance, like the Google suite (you

would be using a compiled programming language for that rather than PHP, anyway)

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With limited hardware resources that call for top performance as well (not really a likely

scenario because programming costs are now always higher than hardware costs)

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Specialist or experimental applications that may evolve in completely unknown direction or

work with some custom solutions, like interfaces for scientiﬁ c experiments with an object-

oriented database

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When you really need (and can afford) total control over the code and evolution of the

application

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When you want to create a web app, but you or your co-workers don’t want or, even worse,

cannot learn how to use a framework

These conditions are generally fulﬁ lled by three types of projects: small static websites, extremely

specialist websites, and failed websites. Frameworks are created for development of common web

applications with well-known standard architecture. Of course, they may be greatly extended

thanks to plug-ins and modules, but complete alteration of their structure may require much

painful hacking, so you should always check their capabilities with the design requirements of

your project.

PHP versus Other Programming Languages

PHP for many years has been a very popular programming language; however, it was commonly

judged as unprofessional. A stereotypical PHP developer was an undereducated freelancer pro-

ducing cheap, low-quality code. Professionals were supposed to use Zope, ASP, or various Java

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