Do you guys have any experience with the new PHP framework Jackal?
http://www.jackalphp.com
It is fresh, just-released and I was wondering if it is a good one. Can it be a substitute of frameworks like Kohana, Symphony or Zend? Well Zend has too many pre-biuld modules and functionality. Maybe a comparison with Kohana is better.
I am asking cause I am looking for a framework to use in my future projects.
Thanks
This looks more like a hobby product than a serious framework.
A sure sign it's not production ready is the lack of Unit-Tests. There are none in the downloadable package. Any refactorings and additions the developers apply to the framework are high risk. Without Unit-Tests, they cannot guarantee change does not break existing functionality. You do not want to build an application on top of that.
I also could not find any license information. There is none in the source code. The ToS link on the website is empty. Without a clearly defined license agreement, you are putting yourself in danger of infringing on IP.
There is also no information regarding how the development updates are handled. Can minor version upgrades contain BC breaks? And why is there no public repository when Sourceforge and Git are free to use. I couldn't find a bugtracker either.
I'd stay away from that unless they professionalize.
We probably released the framework a little prematurely, but we are very serious, and this is not a hobby project. We have been using it in commercial application development for over a year now.
You do raise some excellent points about things we are missing. We are currently using Assembla as a repository, but we will soon be moving to something else so that we can make it public.
Unit testing and licensing information are also on the way.
If those are the only things you are concerned about, that's great news =). Our biggest goal was to build a framework that leverages the advantages of a procedural language like PHP, speeds up development, and just makes sense. We have used a lot of frameworks before, and while they all have their strengths... none of them are what we, as developers, need in a framework. While that is a very subjective statement, I believe Jackal makes some serious improvements on other frameworks that developers will come to love.
In short, we really appreciate you taking the time to give Jackal a chance, and hope you will continue to follow our progress as we add more "professionalization" to our framework. =)
Best Regards,
Jackal Team
Related
I already have v1 of my webapp written in Codeigniter/PHP.
I'm now working on v2, which will have some significant changes to all MVC components.
I'm pretty comfortable with CI and I like it. Very intuitive for a C coder like me.
But I am wondering if it is worth it to rewrite the app in Rails?
Will the productivity gains be worth the cost of learning another framework from scratch?
I want to be practical and not chase something just because it's cooler or more fun.
Here are some productivity criteria:
HTML and CSS generation is fairly labor intensive. Does Rails have anything distinctive to help with this?
I'd like to reuse other people's code for commonly implemented functionality (e.g. interfacing with FB, Twitter, and other social sites). How much more 3rd party code reuse would I get with Rails?
How much more benefit would I get from the Rails community vs. CI community?
Make automated testing easier. I test manually today, which is labor-intensive.
I'd appreciate specific benefits vs. idealistic/religious arguments.
Thanks!
Codeigniter is obviously a framework built on PHP. While there are fundamental differences between PHP and Ruby, all of your criteria can be met with either of the two languages. Migrating to Ruby would seem to be a waste of time considering your requirements. There are plenty of ways to automate HTML/CSS in PHP and there are numerous open source Facebook/Twitter integrations (just check FB and Twitter developer sections). There are also plenty of open source PHP testing options available. Google is your friend! IMO it would be a big waste of time to rewrite your entire application for the sake of your criteria when there are plenty of PHP solutions to your problem.
I think the better comparison here would be CI to Symfony. Symfony 1.4 is a PHP framework pretty much on par with Rails functionality - as far as I can tell through my research, anyway (I'm not a Ruby programmer).
If you were to switch to to Symfony, you would gain a lot of productivity tools. Symfony 1.4 + Doctrine has the ability to generate a lot of your code/interface for you. Symfony/Doctrine likes to keep you away from repetitive tasks such as building models and data validation.
If you want to do your research ahead of time, I suggest reading through Symfony's free e-book Piratical Symfony to give you an idea of how things work in Symfony.
Now, with all that said I feel obliged to mention that the Symfony team is working on Symfony 2.0 which will not be backwards compatible with Symfony 1.4. The expected release date is March of 2011. I expect that maintenance on Symfony 1.4 will continue in the future.
-- Edit --
I also think that sticking with your native language would allow you to develop with the least amount of overhead. Changing to a new language means having to learn it's up's and downs in order to be truly productive.
IE to be at a point where you're not coming back in 6 months to fix a bug that an experienced Ruby developer would have known to avoid.
To me, this is more a question of how big your current web app is. If it took you a couple of weekends and you do not have a tight deadline, I would switch to Ruby/Rails.
However, if it's significantly large and you actually want to come up with R2 in a timely fashion, I would suggest sticking with PHP.
As to your specific questions, I'm not too familiar with PHP, but I don't think Rails will give you a whole lot more in the HTML/CSS department. Not sure about the next two bullet points. Ruby does have much better automated testing tools, with new stuff coming out all the time.
Here are a couple links about Derek Sivers, who switched from PHP to Rails to PHP and now likes Rails again. It might help your thinking.
http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_switched_back_to_p_1.html
http://railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book#foreword
I'm building this web site for my friend's startup. The site when its complete should be able to handle 10,000 users at a time and should have great security.
I've been developing the site individually till now and everything seems to be pretty feasible, but some of my developer friends suggest that i move to a framework.
What are the pros and cons of moving to a framework?
Also i have developed a pretty big part of the website till now, so can i just move it into a framework environment. I've never worked on any kind of framework before.
Cons of going to a framework:
a learning curve
you may have to approach things differently then you would normally
performance overhead (probably slight)
Pros (of a GOOD framework):
much of the mundane coding is already done
helps you write clear, compartmentalized code
libraries included to help you with security, database communication, etc
easier for other developers to jump into the project
bug fixes from the framework's community
The number one benefit of moving to a framework is that the people who developed the framework already solved (most of) the problems you would face if you would do everything yourself. I think this argument should be enough to answer your question.
If you need help in choosing a framework, stackoverflow has lots of already answered questions in this area. You should take a look at some of the opinions already posted and decide what you need.
Why do you want to invent the wheel over and over again? Building your own system is, in my opinion, only usefull if you want to learn how to build such a system and get familiair with the basics of a CMS. The problem with it is that you have to do all the debugging yourself which will take ages. With a framework, other people already did that work for you, so you can make progress much faster.
There is no thing like a best framework. I have worked with Zend Framework and Kohana 3. Both are really nice frameworks but if it was up to me I would take Kohana. Remember there are many more frameworks and this is not a complete comparison. Just give it a google and choose the one you feel most comfortable with.
Good luck!
I would suggest the Zend Framework as per your requirement.Just look at site view futures,but it some what difficult to learn in start.But if you want customization then Core php is the best.For security you have to know the things some better way like sql injection & design the architecture according to it.For faster development you can also move to ROR.
Have Dream Day
Further to my comments, I find working with other peoples frameworks rather a procrustean endeavour. Because I wrote it, I know my framework inside out and can rattle code off very quickly whereas when I am coding for a popular framework like CodeIgniter, Zend or Symfony it takes me that little bit longer to remember how I'm supposed to do something in the way they want me to.
Of course, a lot of the hurdles, common tasks and security issues will have been encountered and solved for you if you use a framework. However, if you've already written a large part of the website code then refactoring it to leverage a framework could be quite a substantial undertaking unless you've been quite clever with your initial architecture and have things loosely coupled.
We are currently looking joining an open source PHP farmework project instead of continuing to work on our own PHP MVC code. Likely candidates are Yii and Solar, because they appeal to our own coding style, have tackled issues that we feel need tackling.
I realize there are plenty of PHP frameowrk related questions on SO already. However, I'm having a really hard time finding people that actually use one of these (esp. Solar) in a real world environment.
So, my question: did anyone work a real life project with one of these? How did it work out for you? What were the major issues?
I'm not looking for benchmarks or excitement about the theories behind each of these. It's clear that their creators of both frameworks did a tremendous job. What I want to know is:
did you use it?
did you like it?
pro's and cons based on real world use?
I use Solar daily for internal applications at work and personal projects at home. It is a top-notch, solid framework that I can highly recommend to anyone. It is in beta3, but stable should be coming along in the next couple of months.
A common criticism is the lack of documentation. I am happy to say that that is changing rapidly. New documentation is being written daily. In fact, two new chapters are already up.
A great way to get involved in Solar, or to get questions answered is to visit the IRC channel #solar-talk on freenode, or join the Solar Talk mailing list.
Visit the Solar website for all the info.
I can't comment on Solar or Yii because I've never used them. When I've given both a cursory look, they did not seem as stable as frameworks I've used before. I've developed with CakePHP for years and have run into the PHP 4 barrier with it, where continuing to develop for PHP 4 does not make sense any longer. Ultimately, it just costs more money.
If you are looking for a framework to build upon, I would recommend looking into the following:
Zend Framework
Lithium
All are very modular by nature (including Solar and Yii), with support for integrating excellent tools like the Doctrine ORM. Some assume Doctrine is your ORM of choice. Honestly, it should be.
ZF is decidedly PHP5 only, which I like. I also appreciate the modularity of it. I can create a base "project" and then add individual "apps" to it, each with their own models/views/controllers. You can also use its classes/features individually without the entire framework bootstrapping process. It is backed by Zend, and is very mature -- I'm assuming because so many trained eyes have used and improved it. The consequences of this are fantastic: just browse through the web site, follow the quick start and look at the available components in the reference guide and you'll see what I mean.
Lithium was forked off from CakePHP's Cake3 project, aiming for a framework with support only for PHP 5.3 and PHP 6. It is decidedly PHP 5.3 only, which means it has hitched its wagon to the newest stable PHP with the most features, such as anonymous functions, a native MySQL driver, and much more. Worth looking into if you are able to move your team to a PHP 5.3-only environment, especially if you have people who know the value of more modern programming techniques found in languages like Python or Ruby. It is a young framework, but has much of the same talent behind it that CakePHP has had, so that gives it a huge thumbs up in my book.
I've used Yii a bit now and have found that it's worked quite well for me. The main con against it is that it's still relatively new and most people haven't heard about it.
That said though, if you were to pick it up as your main framework, that would help it become better known and you might even consider helping Qiang with some development work.
Just when you are deciding, make sure you've had a look through the issues list to make sure that you are aware of what the current bugs are, and what the upcoming features/changes will be.
I can't comment at all on Solar.
I've worked for a handful of digital and new media design agencies in the North East of England for a couple of years now and have yet to come across an instance of the development team using a framework.
Most web design and development agencies these days favour creating their own framework or CMS; I guess it's a form of validation for them. They don't feel they're worth their salt unless they can develop their own systems and solutions from scratch. Hell, I'm the same and have build my own CMS!
The advantage of using an existing framework is that development time is reduced as commonly-used libraries and helpers are already pre-built and ready to be implemented. However, the use of a framework can easily become a con if the framework used isn't commonly known.
So for instance, if you use an obscure framework like Solar that not many developers are familiar with, any other developers working on your sites are going to have an additional learning curve, which in turn increases development time; the opposite of the desired effect.
Hope this helps you. Commonly-used PHP frameworks out there at the moment include CodeIgniter and CakePHP.
I'm interested in using a CMS instead of building a website from scratch. However, as a software engineer, if I'm going to be using open-source tools, I'm going to use them to their full extent, including the possibility of developing plugins/extensions/modules and maybe even contributing core code.
I'm currently looking at WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla!. They all appear to have the features I need, either as core features or plugins. However, I'm curious how hard it is to learn the system and then develop for it.
Does anyone have experience with this? When using and developing WordPress, Drupal, and/or Joomla!, what were your experiences like?
I avoid Joomla like the plague. It is highly difficult to extend, especially if your use case isn't one of the ones their devs specifically designed the CMS for. Great if you want to do a small business brochure site, but if you're looking to heavily customise... ditch it. The pay-to-play nature of much of the dev community is a turnoff, too.
WordPress is very heavily specialised in the blogging direction. If that fits your needs, go for it - it's a slick, well supported, system. If you're looking for something that's a bit more complex in a CMS, though, go with...
Drupal. My favourite PHP CMS, hands down, with the exception of blogging. Functions like hook_nodeapi, hook_user, hook_form_alter, etc. make it essentially effortless to heavily tweak the function of nearly everything in the system. If I want to replace the password field in the user login form with an upload field and MD5() the uploaded file to verify the user, I can do that - without hacking core code, and in a few lines of form alteration and validation code. Pretty astounding the first couple times you do something slightly nutty like that.
I haven't used Joomla much and have never really needed to tweak Wordpress outside the design but have used Drupal quite extensively. Drupal seems to be becoming the standard for PHP CMS' which I think is quite a shame given how much is wrong with it. I won't try to tell you why you should use it, or shouldn't, but here's a few things that I find really annoying with it.
Complete lack of OOP. Ok, in Drupal 7 they're finally doing some OOP with the Abstraction Layer but the community as a whole still shuns the entire concept of OOP as it applies to the CMS as a whole. And given their dependence on modules and third party code doing a decent OOP setup would help keep the code more organized. Currently to avoid naming conflicts you need to prefix all functions and constants with your module name which can lead to some very long function names which can lead to some very long lines of code which can make things a little less readable than doing something like $node->parent()->parent()->title;
Drupal content is completely unorganized. When doing an information heavy site it's imperative that you have well organized content and Drupal simply doesn't allow this. Drupal's content management is just one large list of nodes with a few filters you can apply. There are ways you can use Drupal's taxonomy system and other modules to setup relationships but I've never found any that actually make the interface easier to navigate and make it easy to manage the content on the templates. At work I've created a module that allows this but it's required dumping weeks worth of development time into it a simple feature that any good CMS should come with out of the box.
The admin interface is absolutely rancid. This one pretty much speaks for its self but install a copy of Drupal and click around. Then take a look at say, the Radiant interface (Radiant is Rails I know, but we're talking UI here). Another example of a good UI for the admin would be FrogCMS, a PHP port of Radiant.
No ORM, and absolutely no attempt to have one, means you better like writing lots of SQL to get the data you need. While I generally have no problems with writing my own SQL it's starting to get a bit old when most good frameworks and CMS' built on them have at least some kind of ORM for you to use. Even if it's a botched one.
Drupal loves to use non-standard file extensions (.module, .info, .install, .inc, etc) so you better make sure your htaccess and/or virtual host is setup to not allow direct access to these files or all your source code will be wide open for the world to see.
Personally I think FrogCMS looks like it's off to a good start to be an up-and-comer if the maintainers allow the community to contribute to it and allow it to grow. You'll need to do more coding as it doesn't have a big feature set out of the box and doesn't have a plugin repository like Drupal or Joomla but from a coding standpoint it's setup with a pretty well done, albeit basic, MVC implementation that will help your code be more organized and easier to maintain.
I've only developed for Joomla! and have been a user of wordpress, but Joomla! development is too clumsy if you want to completely change the layout. Writing a plugin or 'component' is fairly easy if you know the way around the code, but getting it to do exactly what you want isn't so easy because it likes to force you to use it's MVC design pattern which I find too clumsy.
I've seen both the Joomla! and Drupal code base, and I'd say that Joomla!'s code is much cleaner and better documented. It also heavily uses the MVC design pattern which can be good or bad depending on your preference and what you want to use it for. It has the most extensive use of OO programming in any php project I've seen.
I haven't developed for wordpress, but as a user, automatic updates are a godsend! plugins and themes can be found and installed through an interface in wordpress itself, so as a developer you save a bit of time in trying to promote your plugin because it gets made available to everyone right away. Heavy modifications might break some of of this though, so I wouldn't recommend it if you want to modify it a lot.
Joomla!'s plugin community is heavily monotized, but there is a huge community of plugin developers. I don't know about Drupal, and most wordpress plugins are free. So that's something to consider as well if you plan on using third party plugins.
over the years, i began hating PHP, since i had to work a lot with it until i found good alternatives, so the first question i ask you is: does it have to be PHP?
but staying with PHP i'd add the following:
most people like Drupal a lot because of it's extensibility ... that's fine, but it still has some design problems ... it's is very potent and flexible and has a huge user base -> lot of plugins, big community to ask for advice etc.
when it comes to Joomla, one has to say, that in the past, this has been a really a complete mess ... but in version 1.5 the whole thing was redesigned and is now very clean ... i always laughed down at joomla, but recently i had a talk with some other developer i had worked with on several occasion, who quite conviced me, that it has become a developer friendly software ... plus, it is soooooooo damn easy to administrate ... i know no other CMS that is so easy to use (and is a "real" CMS, not a forum or blogging engine)
you might wanna have a look at Vanilla CMS ... very sexy, still slick and powerful ...
use a CMS based on a good PHP framework ... typo3 (Flow3 (IMHO really the most funky PHP framework)), something based on symfony (can't find anything, but this should be a good start), mambo (CakePHP) or maybe something based on code igniter ... you will always need to get familiar with the framework, but a) this is always good, b) if the framework is good, the app is likely to be good and extensible, c) you yourself will have a high productivity when building extensions since the framework will do a lot for you ...
finally, you might wanna have a look at opensourcecms ... always helpful ...
good luck with your choice then ... ;)
greetz
back2dos
We have been going back and forth a lot around our office lately about abandoning a proprietary framework that was developed here a couple of years ago and move to something that is larger and community supported.
Our current solution was built to include only the things we need and is very flexible, by flexible i mean that it is loose and the developers that have built sites with it over the years have take liberty in that, so a lot of sites we manage and have built and not to any standard at all. Here at the office I use the framework somewhat but prefer to use other tools. Over the years I have used a lot of PHP frameworks ranging from Code Igniter to CakePHP and have been a big fan of Zend Framework for all my personal projects so I am heavily biased and that is why i am asking here for advice from people who may be able to give me a more objective opinion. In the office a lot of work has been done on our framework so I can understand why some people might be hesitant to abandon it but the way i see it is this:
We don't currently spend a lot of time keeping our framework current and checking it over and over for bugs, we fix them as we find them. Which we should be doing
Any work done to improve our framework is directly put into our overhead column
We have a application built on top of our framework that is subscription based and closed source that we sell and I feel could be better if built to a better standard using a popular, community driven, framework that would require or encourage these things.
I searched and found this thread, Why do I need to use a popular framework?, that was similar to what I am asking but not quite. What i am asking for are opinions on as to why you would do one thing or the other, i don't really want to start a conversation about which framework is better, that will be the next step for us if we chose to switch.
Here are some of the reasons i see switching to a supported, open source framework as helping us in the long run:
As PHP puts out new versions the core of the framework will be updated to take advantage of those things without us having to do the work.
Security concerns with the libraries will be found by the community and patched without our involvement other than updating our code base with the current version.
Lots of information on the internet and exisitng code that can be used as reference
Ability to hire outside programmers that know the framework already, instead of hiring people and expecting them to have to learn how to use our proprietary one.
Ability to give back to the community through patches, plugins, helpers, and support.
Here are the negatives that I have come up with:
We will have to port all the existing code we have in our custom application to the new system
Our employees will have to be allowed a certain amount of time to learn a new framework and it's ins and outs
Our current framework is very flexible and loose which allows us to build things how ever we want and this keep our developers from having to follow and obey and conventions, which some developers seem to hate. I personally like conventions
Again it is probably obvious that I am biased and this is the reason I am asking here, I am open minded to what anyone might have to say.
Your question is really devilishly biased, because all pro's are long-term and all con's short-term development pains. :) But if the situation is even half as much as you describe, switching is the right thing and will save a lot of money in the long run.
My company is in the same sort of situation. We have a custom developed framework in Perl that never seems to get quite as much attention paid to developing new features and fixing bugs as the open source frameworks do. I and most other developers would love to switch to something open source for the benefits you mention, but nobody has the budget to spend the time porting code over. Our current plan is to use an open source framework if we have any small, new projects come up, and if that's successful consider moving older apps over.
I've mostly worked with Perl and Ruby, but a trend I'm seeing more of these days is frameworks allowing you to mix and match framework core components. For example, we're considering integrating parts of our custom framework into Catalyst. That way we can still use some of our custom developed code components (our own DBI class and some Mason templates) and porting our applications won't be as difficult. Ruby on Rails is also moving in the direction of being more modular.
Perhaps there's a PHP framework that might allow you to use some of your code, or at least make it easier to shoehorn some of your code into the framework instead of starting from scratch. Googling I see most of the PHP frameworks claim to be modular, but some appear to just allow you to develop add-ons, not swap out core components.
Sounds like you're doing some good analysis and I wish you luck in your search.
I think the most important points you highlighted here. The decision now, should be based, on numbers. Technically your analysis is perfect. What i would ask now is: How much it would cost for your company,to:
* keep your app to take advantage of new php improvements without break your old code (it means: architecture analysis, development and test, test, test).
* Do you have any developer/analyst focused in security development? (it means: security development life cycle, test, test, test).
* Do you have a development methodology? Normally those frameworks are kept under a good distributed development methodology.
I had the same question than you sometime ago, and my company decided to choose a framework, migrate our code, allocate 2 developers 1 day per week to work on the framework. To put our team to work with the framework development team was good, because we learned more about the framework, we helped the community (demagogy :-)) and we could add some business requirements in the framework features road map ;-)
I and my team are nearing completion of porting an existing application across to run on Zend Framework and it's gone quite well.
The old application had a lot of issues that were going to be big problems to fix and we decided to take the plunge and rebuilt it in ZF.
It has however taken a long time to port, I would estimate for our application it's taken us a good 4-5 months of dev to port everything across (we have taken the opportunity to rejigg the database and other areas of the system).
If you do go for it then be prepared to explain to your bosses why you need to spend a good chunk of time porting rather than working on income generating work. We were lucky to be able to use a new project as the impetus to carrying out all this work.
I see a couple of cons of switching over.
First, of course, there's:
We will have to port all the existing
code we have in our custom application
to the new system
Followed by:
We will have to port all the existing
code we have in our custom application
to the new system
and, last, but, not least:
We will have to port all the existing
code we have in our custom application
to the new system
You were talking about "money in the overhead column", and rewriting working tested code in to new working tested code doesn't add a whole lot of value.
If you're talking about introducing a new framework for a brand new, unrelated project, or one that uses little of the existing code base, then, sure, knock yourself out. That's a fine opportunity to switch frameworks, platforms, languages, etc.
But an existing, shipping, mature code base with existing knowledgeable folks working on it?
That's a hard pill to swallow, personally.
If you want folks to follow standards and conventions, then ... follow standards and conventions. Since you have a system that allows folks the "freedom to what they want", make "following standards and conventions" something they want to do.
It's always better to transition a system incrementally that throw the whole baby, bathwater, soap, basin and towels out the window just to go back and redo the exact same thing again.
Everyone wants to rewrite code, I want to do it. Our framework needs a "do over" here. But then we go "yea, but..." and what do we get in the end? N Months of effort to get back to where we are now. That doesn't do much in a world where time to market matters.