I’ve never been a fan of fully-fledged (“big“) frameworks like Symfony or CodeIgniter. (There, I said it!) .
I’d rather just start from somewhere comfortable where I know every class that’s in scope and I know nothing is present that I don’t absolutely need.
It seemed silly to me that the simplest web applications can be 80% framework code and 20% application-specific code (even if that’s not at all in terms of code coverage on average, just present code). Another reason was that I love to learn. I don’t feel like I’m learning when I’m just learning an API or the contents of some slightly pretentiously presented user manual for a framework. Writing a framework, however?…
~ My angle ~
Looking at the things my friends use the big frameworks for; I find it strange that most of the use is to do simple things like handling the flow of the application; things we used to do with a few lines like a switch or if…elseif…endif statement.
Two years ago or thereabouts, I noticed that each time I started work on something new in PHP, I’d start by copying a load of stuff over from my last project. I then noticed that I’d become what I hated, kind of. Still, more recently, I decided to neaten this collection of classes up, formalise it and write some documentation that is understandable by people other than myself.
My framework, I have named simply Transcend Framework (TF for short and in the code…) to fit in with the branding of the rest of the stuff I work on. What does it include? Not much. I don’t need much.
- MVC stuff - Model & Controller abstracts and Views implemented using a fast, simple template engine that is extensible through inheritance.
- Extends PHP’s autoloading mechanism – just makes everything a little neater and quicker to get started.
- A configuration & message handling mechanism to ease the debugging and testing of applications in development and the configuration of applications in production.
It’s on GitHub if you want to take a look at it, but I strongly suggest you have a bash at putting something together yourself. It’s a great learning experience if you are just getting in to PHP. You can get a handle on organising classes, writing good inline documentation, inheritance, interfaces and lots more. Frameworks generally push language features to the max; so it’s definitely a good way to polish your knowledge. Feel free to fork TF and have a play.
~ Cringey summary ~
So, the answer to my slug in the title of this post? Your own. I think everybody should have a toolkit of code they use a lot, keep it as a git repo, include it with submodules so it’s easy to roll out updates to all your uses of it.
Cue cringes.
The router Virgin supply – the Super Hub – is effectively a rebranded Netgear specced with a EuroDOCSIS modem instead of an ADSL one. It’s… alright… certainly not as Super as the name implies. There are a number of bugs and it is quite restrictive in what you can do with it. The best move by far is to place it in “Modem” mode and connect it to another more functional router.
