Hi, I'm Dan Cunningham

I’ve recently been coding alot in PHP and MySQL lately and some fellow designers and developers asked what framework I have been working with. Now when this question was asked I put my hands in the air and said, “Frame work? What frame work!” They all seemed to be amused by my honesty which is cool but they said you’re seriously making things hard for yourself!

How apprently a framework is supposed to make you code things correctly into various libs and use them consistantly throught the backend code. The only issue with that is, most of the bespoke content that I write requires unique libs that are only referenced once, this makes the whole point of using a framework silly as I’m not actually saving anytime at all by doing this.

I did look into various frameworks though, and i have found that the following ones are really quite good, and depending on your knowledge and speed in picking up various code languages, you might want to have a dabble with some of these for yourself!

Frame Works
Code Igniter: http://codeigniter.com
Description: CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications. If you’re a developer who lives in the real world of shared hosting accounts and clients with deadlines, and if you’re tired of ponderously large and thoroughly undocumented frameworks

Cake PHP: http://cakephp.org
Description: CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications. Using commonly known design patterns like MVC and ORM within the convention over configuration paradigm, CakePHP reduces development costs and helps developers write less code.

Zend: http://framework.zend.com
Description: To provide a lightweight, loosely-coupled component library simplified to provide 4/5s of the functionality everyone needs and that lets you customize the other 20% to meet your specific business needs. By focusing on the most commonly needed functionality, we retain the simplified spirit of PHP programming, dramatically lower the learning curve, and your training costs – so developers get up-to-speed quickly.

ash.MVC: http://www.ash-mvc.org
Description: The basic approach of this framework is to adopt a middle-path approach between faster development cycle, and a robust and scalable application. Moreover, the schemes proposed in the framework stick to the line of simplicity all along.

WASP: http://wasp.sourceforge.net/content/
Description: WASP is a powerful web application framework built on PHP 5. WASP strives to allow web developers to make great applications with more fun and less code, but in the familiar playground of PHP.

All the above prooved to work well at doing very similar tasks, but each has there own way of doing it. If you like the community based type of projects then i suggest Code Igniter/Cake PHP/Zend is the path you’d need to take, but at the end of the day a frame work is a personal choice, so it is really each to their own. Me personally? well, Im just going to be dabbling in a bit of everything, usually coding bespoke code means I have to be able to appoach it from various sides. Im still unsure which path I’m wanting to take with MVC! *shrugs*