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Closed 12 years ago.
When a Web framework ( like django, ruby on rails, zend, etc ) isn't convenient to use ?
And so... When a Web programming language ( like PHP, Asp, Python, etc ) is better than a Web Framework ?
I like the wikipedia description:
The framework aims to alleviate the
overhead associated with common
activities performed in Web
development. For example, many
frameworks provide libraries for
database access, templating frameworks
and session management...
Basically if you don't need all of the above, you don't need a framework.
You don't need frameworks when you don't plan to use their features.
The difference is, in my opinion, the simpleness of what you are trying to build.
Are you trying to make a difficult, complicated web app, or are you making a simple script that performs a trivial task? In the first case you absolutely need a framework, in the second case.. don't even bother.
The rule that I have is that if whatever I'm building is only going to be a single page, I'll usually do it in just PHP. Whenever I need more than one page, I go with a framework (Symfony), because that usually means that I'm going to want things like routing and proper dispatching of requests.
This does however depend a lot on the language. In languages like PHP, the time needed to set up a project to use an MVC framework may be a lot more than just solving the problem. Other languages may very well be designed around using an MVC framework, and has a very low setup cost for that.
A web framework is supposed to provide means to handle certain kind of interaction. If you have site with no interaction or no "adaptation", you don't need either framework or programming language, you simply write HTML files and publish your files.
As you start to add features for the back-end (like publishing more plain pages) or in the front end (like sorting a list when the user clicks "order by") you start getting into frameworks/programming languages.
Basic interaction was handled with CGI - you write an script which responds with a string to a few parameters passed via a form. Then you have database access.
In my experience, if you need simple features AND want your website to be suitable for growth without resorting to rewriting it from scratch, you should start from a web framework like Django. You can do simple things quite easily in Django (granted - it is not trivial) and add very complex behavior with small, incremental steps.
When you have to build a very complex site, and the functionality is already exists in a CMS (eg Drupal, it has amazingly lot contrib for everything).
I'm at that stage where, because I spent so much time learning a framework recently, even if I do a one page "website", I will still use one, need to get my ROI up :p
Related
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Closed 10 years ago.
I am writing a website in PHP where the aim is to allow the users to enter some monthly data, this is stored in MySQL, and at any point a user can view statistics to do with there data. I have all the basics done, however my code is completely unreadable, it is a mass of if statements, with no obvious structure, even with comments it's fairly opaque. How should I structure my code elegantly, and in what way should I utilise the OOP features of PHP.
Well.. I can only tell you what I generally do, not if it's the 'best' way or if there are more transparent workflows... just that it works for me very well ;)
First thing, and most important:
get rid of ALL non-php code in your php, for html display use templates either make a template system yourself or get one off the shelf (smarty for example).
Try to identify structures you use very often (like sql conenction and access) and put those into classfiles (you can easily change your sql system that way if you need to, by just editing ONE file, not countless others too)
Now find duplicate codeflow (mostly identical if-else-structures and so on)
and create functions for them to replace the original code with said function.
maybe even create more classes for functions that belong to a certain task.
So you end up with one class for the db, one for user information and editing, one for adding, editing and removing informations, and one for html output (and maybe even more)
Now set up your file system accordingly (put class files into a subfolder, templates in another, the same for images, javascripts etc.pp)
Next: Find all "settings"
All predefined values that may need to be changed, and put those into a settingsfile (init.php for example) maybe even as a class construct.
And as the last part, clean up all the mess inside single phps you cannot reduce further.
First: all the setup, include the files(classes) you need setup define the constants you will need for this script etc.
Second: all the script functions either in alphabetical or logical order.
and last the codeflow.
And that's it (a lot of work...) But you'll end up with a structure that I find easy to maintain. If you need to edit a setting, than it is in the init.php for sure, you want to change some db-structures or have changed your database, then you'll just need to update your sql.php and the like.
If someone else has to maintain the code too, you'll most likely will have to comment each file properly as well, personally I use comments for myself as well, since I have some scripts that needed to be changed after five or more years, that way I still know what goes where ;)
Good luck!
I recommend reading up on code cohesion and loose coupling, those are important concepts which you need to familiarize yourself with if you're to build great, maintainable applications.
You should also catch-up on design patterns and common usage cases, if not all of them - atleast the big ones, which are IMO: singletons, factories, DI and IoC (you see those across the board).
Once you've got the theoratical thinking going, you should start writing your code in an indsutry-standard type of way, which for PHP is MVC - you can use one framework, whichever really doesn't matter much, once you've learnt one framework - reading alot of other projects code will be very easy because it usually follows the same pattern with some written better than others.
Good Luck!
You are in need of a framework to structure your code. Luckily for you, this problem has been solved by many. CodeIgniter, Cake, Zend, Kohana, Symfony, Yii, Slim, Laravel, Fuel, the list goes on.
I highly recommend you look into CodeIgniter as your first PHP framework. The documentation and community are both second-to-none.
You may use some kind of PHP framework like Yii, Zend, Symfony or Kohana. MVC separation will be your good friend.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I been having this idea spooking around in my head for 2 weeks now. I’ve finally created some cases and plans on where I want to go with this project. I will have to create both a web application (ASP.NET) and a desktop application (Java). Both these applications will need to have sync’d databases.
I’ve been thinking about creating a public API over my database so my front-end and 3rd parties could communicate to the database. But I’ve never really attempted something like this before. I’ve spend my weekend so far on reading up on how I could approach this and I’ve gotten a pretty good idea. I’m having some questions/doubts currently and was hoping perhaps someone could help me.
1) I’m currently still in university and I don’t have a job so my pockets don’t go very deep. I’ve been thinking of writing the API in PHP, I already have possession of an unmetered hosting account and else I would be forced to buy .NET hosting which can turn out to be quite expensive. However my PHP knowledge is quite limited towards parsing user input/security. Would it be wise to search for an (e)book around this topic or would I be fine with online tutorials, do you have any suggestions on where to look? Should I put my time in writing a possible vulnerable PHP API or should I look at other options?
2) So far I’ve never really had the need to look into PHP libraries. I was wondering if I should look into some of these (for example cakePHP) to help me develop the API.
3) I’ve experience with implementing Twitter/Linkedin their API’s so I’ve been thinking to use OAuth (v2) to allow people to use my API. Is implementing OAuth to your API a lot of work? Is it well documented enough for someone with only basic PHP knowledge? If you ever used it on your API, what was your experience with it?
4) If this project would ever kick off, it would be wise to look into hosting It in the cloud. Do I currently need to think about something so future cloud integration is possible?
5) For the web application, would there be a (big) performance difference between using the API or directly connecting to the database?
6) Any recommended lecture or tips are welcome. It’s the first time I will be attempting something this big (both in functionalities & required knowledge).
1) Developing a simple API is not that hard with PHP if you have some experience in other languages. Ofcourse, every language has its own way, and when it comes to optimization and stuff like that, you may need some more PHP knowledge.
2) Using a PHP framework would definitely help with the lots of aspects. I use symfony 2 for all my PHP projects. I really suggest checking it. It's a decoupled framework, and you can use individual components from the framework. It's lightweight and fast, and offers great tools to build what you want. What is symfony? explains the benefits. Also, using ORM (I prefer Doctrine) is an option, but this is a whole another topic.
3) If you decide to use symfony2, there are bundles (libraries) for it that you can use. It shouldn't be too hard to implement even without a framework, but I don't have any experience in that area.
4) I don't have any experience in cloud, so can't comment on that.
5) There will be a performance difference as you are adding another layer to your project, but whether it will be a big or small depends on the API, database etc. But, using an API will mean a standard way to communicate with the database, so even with the performance difference, it might be beneficial in terms of consistency and development time(you won't have to deal with different platforms to do database stuff.).
6) The usefulness of the API greatly depends on the application and I can't really say if it outweighs the costs without specific information about the project. But having a standardized way to communicate with the data storage is generally a good idea when dealing with multiple platforms and languages IMO. As I don't know how much do you know about PHP, I can't comment on if it will be worth your time. I would go for it if there is enough time, as learning about PHP would add some more tools in your arsenal and this will be a good opportunity to improve yourself as a developer.
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Closed 11 years ago.
Are there any prerequisites I need to know before I build a website/web application in php?
Anything like ajax, jquery, jsp etc?
PHP is a server side technology, it means the server execute your PHP script and then send the result to the user's browser.
JSP is a concurrent technology based on Java. Your site will be in PHP or JSP, not both.
AJAX stands for "Asynchronous Javascript And XML", it is a way to obtains data from a server with reloading the whole page.
jQuery is a Javascript framework which greatly simplify a lot of common tasks in Javascript.
Javascript is a language which is usually used client side to modify the page or respond to user's action without reloading the page.
You can do a complete site using only PHP without problem. Javascript and everything related (jQuery, AJAX) will help you building a site with better user experience if you do it right.
You can add MySQL to the list, or any other database technology, to store data on the server.
It completely depends on what you want to do, if you want to create a simple blog php is the only thing required, however if you would like to add more features then I would recomend starting the blog and learning more functions as you go along.
There are hundreads of tutorials out there which you can read or watch (on youtube) that will get you started. Most of the other languages such as javascript are touched on as they can make the site easier to use or just look better.
If you want to create a blog or a forum then php is all you need but you may like to start learning other languages once you have a good understanding of php. I would also recomend, if you are new to creating websites, that you should begin by creating a simple site first following a tutorial and then either adapt it or create an entirely different site after you understand the concept of php5.
Like others have said, it depends on what website you're trying to build. You'll be able to get quite far with just PHP/MySQL but for advanced interactivity and dynamics I'd suggest looking into other technologies and combining these into your website along with the PHP.
However, just starting a project and then adding things as you learn is probably the best way. You'll surely get to a point where you want to add something you don't really know how to do, and a quick search will point you towards.. for example, jQuery. That's the point where you can start learning about another jQuery and try to implement whatever it was that you wanted to add to the website.
However, for basic dynamic websites, PHP will do a great job. It all depends on what you want to achieve.
I recommend you to learn PHP hand in hand with MySQL, because it's a common combination for database based web applications.
For MySQL, the most important operations are CRUD
What do you want to create? Just throw in some signal words like guestbook, etc., so we can tell you more about the needed tools.
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Closed 12 years ago.
as web developer using PHP/JS/CSS for years , i suffer from repeat myself over and over and over and over , even if i use a PHP framework , i feel the same thing every time, i start to build new feature , so every time i started new thing i feel the 'Déjà vu' ( i write it before ) , and i rewrite many things from scratch despite i write something same before , if i use previous written code , i may take more time to reuse it , i love programming and web development , but by this way i will lose this :( ...
Where the problem ? in language , my way to built software or what ?
if i use previous written code , i may take more time to reuse it
This, I believe, is your real problem: you're writing way too much quick-and-dirty code and are suffering from the resulting techincal debt. The problem is, what is quick in the short term can lead to being very slow in the long term.
If I may offer a non-technical comparison, consider a Ferrari and a cargo ship. When delivering just one letter, it seems obvious that the Ferrari would be much faster not to mention much more convenient compared to using a cargo ship. Just loading the ship before leaving the docks can take hours. By which time the Ferrari would have already completed the delivery. But when you have to deliver a hundred tons of mail, the cargo ship would complete the delivery while the Ferrari would still be busy speeding back and forth delivering each letter.
It's the same in your case. When developing just a single web site, it will always seem obvious that you should write the least amount of the simplest possible code to get the job done quickly. And if your whole career is devoted to just one web site I would even say that that's the right way to do it. It is, after all, the essential spirit of Agile methods. But if your job is to develop websites (plural) then this approach will start to become slower with each new site. Just like how the Ferrari is not ideal for delivering a hundred tons of anything.
One real world example is 37signals. When their business model requires that they should be able to quickly develop and deploy sites as necessary, instead of just diving in and develop their first site in a quick-and-dirty way, they took a step back and developed Ruby on Rails instead.
I'm not saying that you should go ahead and start your own framework, re-inventing the wheel is exactly what you want to avoid at this point. What I'm suggesting is to separate the functionality you're developing from the web related code. In other words, when writing new code write it as a library. Yes, it's a bit more involved writing code in two or more files compared to inlining the functionality directly in the PHP page. But in the end your next web site would be easier/quicker to implement.
I always, as a matter of habbit, create a lib directory in a project's base directory whenever I start a new project. I then force myself to write all code even remotely reusable as separate modules in this directory. These days I find that, more often than not, I'd simply copy (or more commonly make a symlink) of files I need to the lib directory instead of writing the needed code.
The problem is that when PHP started, every tutorial, every demo and all code was made in a very structured way, because PHP descended from the C/C++ family. Many developers took this problem and have carried it, and it was visible that we couldn't keep this.
Now, we have PHP 5.3.3 available, we have namespaces, objects, classes, interfaces and all of this. Many of the things that helpt making bad code like magic quotes and register globals are now deprecated. PHP is evolving into the OO world, it took long enough, but is happening. So if you want to start again to "relearn" PHP I would suggest getting your hands on some frameworks like:
symfony, joomla, propel, doctrine
learn about mvc and design patterns applied to PHP and you will see how you'll start making good OO code, and the deja-vus might stop before you knwo it.!
Hope I can help
David
This is exactly why a framework is the best way to go. It takes out the mundane parts of code (the stuff you always have to write over and over like DB connections).
I would suggest picking a good framework (I use CakePHP, but there are others like Symphony, Codeignitor, Zend, etc.), and as you build various components, you can reuse them in other projects. It will reduce the time it takes to write all future projects.
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Closed 12 years ago.
I'm working on my first professional project. The fact is that I don't know which are the best tools to produce something serious (I'm talking about web-develop through PHP):
Are template engine like Smarty mandatory? Which one is "the best" (the most used, complete, documentated)
At the moment I'm developing on Notepad++ (mostly because I find it useful and complete) is there a better development tool? Or is just a matter of personal taste?
At the moment I'm studying JQuery and deepening my knowledge as regards CSS what other "mandatory" subjects can you suggest me?
This is what I can think of at the moment, have you any other suggestions?
Thank you.
EDIT: As someone made me notice the question is a bit ambiguous. I know the basics (HTTP protocol, Java Script, CSS, HTML, OOP theory and practice etc...). I'm studying computer science at the University (and the project I'm speaking of is my thesis). I need advise on how the "real world" works (outside my basement).
Don't focus on becoming a Professional PHP Programmer. Focus on becoming a professional web developer, and check out the What should a developer know before building a public web site? question.
Saying "I want to become a Professional PHP Programmer" is like saying "I want to be a professional painter" when you actually mean "I want to be a professional artist." Sure, at the end of the day both might paint and get paid for it, but what their customers expect of them is very different ;)
Specifically for PHP I'd recommend:
Learn a good framework. Depending on the size of the project, you can use Zend/Symfony or CodeIgniter/others for small ones. There are tons. I'd stick to Zend/Zymfony for something mid-sized and/or "real world".
In general these frameworks come with a basic template engine or you can plug in other ones like Smarty or Twig. I'd say it improves the code a lot. So, yes to your first question.
Also, notepad++ is amazing, but I recommend using an IDE if you're working on a project and not a simple 2,3 file script. I strongly recommend Netbeans. It has lots of teatures and it's really active. Check it out: http://netbeans.org/features/php/
Since you're coding in PHP, I'd say you get to know the SPL (Standard PHP Library): http://php.net/manual/en/book.spl.php
To sum up:
Strongly recommended to keep code clean and mainteinable.
Yes.Netbeans.
Yes. SPL, and a lot more I can't think of now.
A templating system like Smarty isn't mandatory, since PHP is technically a templating system. However, it's not a very good one. It's clumsy, very easy to make mistakes with, and you frequently end up with an incomprehensible mess.
There are better alternatives than Smarty out there. I'm kind of partial to Twig, myself.
Using a framework is pretty much mandatory these days. Development with a framework is generally much easier and quicker than using raw PHP, once you've got the hang of how it works. Code Igniter's pretty good, although minimal. CakePHP is quite good, although seems very heavyweight at times. Kohana, Symfony, and the Zend Framework are pretty highly regarded as well.
1 - The Smarty engine is very useful and probably the most popular in PHP application development.
2 - I use Aptana studio for PHP development. It's pretty complete and has nice tools coupled with it. It's based on the Eclipse IDE, so it's pretty customizable. The major drawback is that it uses a lot of resources.
3 - I recommend learning development patterns like MVC (Model - View - Controller) to get a good base of how data should be organized.
Also, look up Code Igniter, It's an amazing framework to work with (it uses the MVC pattern). Building something with it is really easy and very easily manageable. If you want simple tutorials, you can check on NetTuts for a serie of tutorials.
Agree with what Pekka is implying, which is that it's important to pick up another lang in addition to PHP. Please. Also, I can't see learning PHP without knowing stuff like Smarty. Notepad++, who cares there, each to his own. jQuery is fine though I might opt for plain vanilla Javascript before getting into a library. Even though jQuery makes things easier it abstracts a lot of stuff and what you really want is those Javascript mechanics.
I would also add a solid knowledge of the HTTP protocol as a must-have that some web devs seem to think is optional. You should know what a hard 404 is, and what content encodings are, and the different flavors of caching disposition, etc, etc, etc.
Above all, have fun!
Most web development includes some degree of database interaction, so good DB skills is always useful.
Basic normalization of tables.
Understanding Transactions
Knowing how to escape your values
before insert/update/etc
write selects with joins how to avoid
nesting database selects within code
loops
differences between database
and PHP dates (and how to work with
them)
etc
My standard recommendation in questions like this, in addition to the excellent suggestions given in the other answers already, is to at least dabble with a strongly typed language like Java, C++, Delphi or C#, with a merciless compiler enforcing discipline - proper declaration of variables, definition of complete class interfaces etc. etc. I love PHP, but it is very permissive and sometimes still shows its templating language roots, and tends to seduce newbies into bad practices. (That said, PHP nowadays is a fine language and it is well possible to write very high-quality software in it.)
However, you say in your update that you do Computer Science at University, so I guess you are already getting your helping of at least one other language, and CS theory, and your focus is indeed which frameworks to use etc.