DEVTRENCH: Web Development from the Front Lines

I’ve recently begun to develop a website in the symfony framework and that got me thinking about why you’d want to develop with a framework at all.

1. Security: All good frameworks come with security helpers to protect your code and data from XSS and other hacking attempts. Make sure the framework you choose escapes all form input and all html output.

2. Scalability: A framework can help you scale your site for massive traffic if it includes a good way to cache output.

3. RAD: This is where symfony and ruby shine – they have excellent CRUD generation tools to do a lot of the coding for you.

4. Standards: Frameworks help your programmers build on defined standards. Really good frameworks build on available standards to make their projects better.

5. Community: If you are a single developer like me, then having resources to draw upon when you can’t figure something out is critical. Communities develop around frameworks that can answer your questions and ease the learning curve.

PHP Frameworks that kick ass:

• Symfony
• CodeIgniter
• CakePHP
• Zend Framework

PHP Framework Comparison

I worked for a long time at a state funded university as a web developer and besides the great insurance they offered, it was a pretty annoying experience. We usually we’d sit down with teachers or researchers to develop custom web applications, but every once and a while we’d sit down with deans or heads of departments and be asked to program some monolithic web app that coordinated data across several departments and organizations. Some of these projects came to fruition but most ended up in total disarray and failure.

This was because of several things, poor management of the project, not enough planning, etc, but I think the main reason is that the entities didn’t want to take responsibility for the proverbial cow. This isn’t because they didn’t care about the project (although some didn’t), but because it would add more work to their already loaded schedules and therefore ‘passing the buck’ was the status quo.

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A hard thing for me to figure out when first using php from the command line was that it uses a different php.ini than apache does,and can even be a different version of php. It was also hard to figure out what php.ini was loaded. Here are some useful commands if you find yourself in this situation:
php -- (tells you which php.ini it's using and where it is, and any additional .ini files parsed)
php -v (php version number)
which php (shows the location of the php executable)
man php (learn all the options for php from the cli)