That just wouldn’t happen in a professional evironment, simple as that – if it did, the project manager(s) should be booted the -beep- out of there.

I can understand it may happen in smaller firms, but hey! they are small for a reason right? they ain’t gonna advance any further than what they have done because they don’t have organisational standards in their company, never mind their -beep- IT department.

To develop, maintain and deploy using your application you certainly do need a level of commitment, professionalism and integrity to complete on it and in some cases those personal characteristics are sadly missing.

But that isn’t a reason as to why not to develop a framework.

Matthew has an interesting point with the 2.5.
I’ve never heard of that.

I think I am at 0.5 stage :)

You should probably use your framework in serious work otherwise there was no new development in any subject, but sure to clear your picture. Dont loose confident.

Imagine you make your framework, use it for several projects and then leave the company (no docs – you know how it works, why docs?). This actually happened in a company in our town. The company is using little custom-extended Zend Framework since that day :D :P

That’s what I meant by “I agree everyone should write his own framework, but nobody should use it for any serious work.” :P

I have used somebody else’s frameworks several times and most of the times there is so much automagic going on that they go against you. You need to learn how to do things their way, look for strange and unpredictable/undocumented behaviour and etc, whereas if you know what you’re doing (here’s the basic premise) you just do it and jump to the next item in the to do list.

The security aspect is quite important as well. With code that you’ve developed, you know exactly what is going on. With somebody else’s code, you either audit everything or have hope ;)

Well, Nette is (was for long time) developed by only one person, and is an exception to the rule.

Why not?

I can think of one reason – security, however any developer with some experience who could develop their own framework would already know enough to secure their framework too.

It is when you have an already established framework and you yourself start to tinker with it, introducing third party modules – modules I might add that are foreign to the established framework – you introduce security holes not only into the framework but your application.

The only other thing I can think of that would make you ponder about a framework is that the code base has been developed from the ground up with no prior application development to test the water.

You never needed to update some data in view and echo it somewhere in layout (higher in the page layout, than the actual place). For me it would mean like 3 days of studying and googling. Framework developers (at least some of them) has already needed it, so they know that it’s needed. If you start your framework, than you will need to rebuild it every time new feature emerges. That extremly ineffective.

I agree everyone should write his own framework, but nobody should use it for any serious work.

Looking at other frameworks is generally a good idea, if only to see how things should not be done ;)

I’ve seen a lot of frameworks and my biggest issue with custom frameworks is that no one but either one developer or a relatively small team see the code. And in this situation anyone is more likely to screw up sooner or later than in an open environment.

When people complain about frameworks, they often forget that frameworks are not written just for them or for their particular use case. No, a framework is written for a wider audience.

The better frameworks communicate this fact very well and allow developers to replace components, or plugin their own.

:agree:

You have to live and learn; that in it’s self is what learning is all about – you learn from your own experiences, mistakes included.

Doesn’t matter how much APIs you study, you got to get your hands dirty. And it’s not only about developing a framework, it’s as much about the other responsibilities that go along with it.

You will never get that feeling simply by using a pre fabricated framework no matter how great it is, how flexible it is or even if it’s loaded full of features, not to mention bloat.

The first change was a BIG BANG. Complete change of thinking. But (not expected) the other one was even bigger! Great thing about ZF is that it’s a gallery of best approaches. Other good thing is that there is class for everything, that can do anything. And even greater is that if that class is an overkill for your needs, you can write your own and substitute it to the framework. That means you don’t waste you days writing a decent router, but you can write your own authentication adapter, db model, super-cuzstomised view helper, etc. learning from the polished interfaces available. You don’t like ZF’s view? Use Smarty instead, or your own layer. Missing some web service API in ZF? Make a class for it using Zend_Rest_Client.

That’s the 0,5 that MatthewW’OP was talking about. And it helps you big way ! I’ve become a better developer in last 1,5 years using ZF then in the 6yrs doing my own PHP :)

Programmer should at least know the basics and be able to write his own framework. Well, I haven’t developed my own framework and I use Zend Framework, but I learn the way it works, especially its MVC components and Tool framework so that I can develop my own extensions to it whenever needed.

Well, I don’t prefer to reinvent the wheel and keep using Zend Framework for production, but I want to be able to do it myself when needed.