Tags: Ruby On Rails,CakePHP,MVC framework, Web Development, PHP Framework

I recently had the opportunity to develop a small online booking system. This time round I was determined to make use of some development framework. Not for me the slow slog of writing all my code from scratch - surely we have moved beyond that now in web development?

The big question was - which framework to use? Since the advent of Ruby on Rails, development frameworks have become quite the flavour d'jour and there are now, well, maybe not thousands of them, but quite a few! The last time I heard there are about 80 development frameworks out there. I am not 100% user of this number, it could be a bit higher, it could be a bit more conservative (on this site you can find about 40 PHP frameworks listed - http://www.phpwact.org/php/mvc_frameworks). The point is, the web developer is now really spoilt for choice. Which is a problem in itself, since having too much choice can leave you dithering between different options.

This article is therefore about how I made my choice, which was CakePHP, and which factors I took into consideration.

Obviously and certainly I will get bombarded with 'Why didn't you try X framework, it is really much simpler to use...' type responses. That is quite OK, to each his own! But this is the choice I made and I am sticking to it. Frankly, the idea of going through another learning curve gives me the heebie-jeebies....

I found that the selection criteria were not independent. In other words, once I've ruled out some frameworks due to some specific criteria, other factors came into play. It was therefore more a process of elimination than judging all the frameworks off a predefined set of critera.

The first major selection point was: Ruby on Rails or not.

Obviously there is the attraction of using a brand new, hip, buzz-word hyped framework. You can't go wrong with something that is getting so much attention... or can you?

Let's look at some of the selection criteria that filtered out Ruby on Rails"
 
1. Ease of installation and ability to run on shared hosting
The problem is that most of my clients make use of a shared hosting environment. Can Ruby on Rails run on common-or garden variety type shared hosting? The answer was, I soon discovered - no. One needs to either have access your own private servers or run on a shared hosting environment that has Ruby on Rails pre-installed. Admittedly, there are a couple of them now starting up. A comprehensive list of hosting providers that offer Ruby On Rails hosting can be found on the RoR Wiki - http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/RailsWebHosts.

2. Minimize the learning curve
Even though I knew that any new framework will involve a steep learning curve, I really didn't have the guts to go through TWO learning curves - one for the language itself and one for the framework. I might still have been prepared to go through the learning curve though if it wasn't for the fact that RoR requires special hosting.

So basically the decision was: Not RoR. And based on criterion 2, I decided to stick to a PHP framework, and not go for something else based on Perl or something else since I've been developing in PHP for the past two, almost three years. Having said this, it is all very well to say that CakePHP allows you to use your PHP skills - because it is an object oriented framework it has its own rich language infrastructure. You still need to learn the CakePHP terminology and the learning curve is pretty steep.)

3. Ability to run on PHP 4
Although PHP 5 offers more object oriented features, once again, not all shared hosts offer PHP 5 out of the box. I decided that I wanted to stick to a framework that will offer backwards compatibility and enable me to run on most of the servers that I, as well as my clients, host on.

This narrowed the playing field down quite considerably!

My further criteria came down to:

4. Must have good documentation
Under good documentation I count the following:
- User manual
- Examples and code snippets
- Screen casts and videos - although I do not see these as essential

5. Good support by the user community
This, in combination with formal documentation is absolutely essential. All of these frameworks are pretty young and the documentation is also constantly evolving. Some documentation might be patchy in details. This is where the user support in terms of the community comes in. How active are the forums? Is there a bug tracker? Any other informal tutorials, write-ups, comments, blogs and other support?

6. Regular upgrades and bug fixes
..but not so close to each other that the software becomes unstable and unusable. Backward compatibility is also important.
Version number of the software can be used to indicate maturity.

Working off the following list (http://www.phpit.net/article/ten-different-php-frameworks/) one can see that the list has narrowed down to the following frameworks:

CakePHP
Seagull Framework
WACT - since 'disqualified' since the latest version now requires PHP 5
Zoop
CodeIgniter

The next step was a bit less scientific - but still fitted in with point 5 - how well is this Framework regarded? How much support does it generate in the 'community'.

I scouted through forums and followed links and surfed the net and tried to get a general feel - and overall, CakePHP did seem to come out tops. A similar check that you can do is the following - do a Google search for each of the frameworks and see how many results are returned. This will give you a good idea of the general support, number of tutorials, number of forum posts and general 'talked about' factor for the specific framework. The results of this type of check can be seen on this page - how popular is Ruby On Rails? 

In summary therefore, the support for Ruby on Rails and the amount of information available for it is astounding and you will probably not go wrong if you decide to go this route. But if you want to stick with a PHP framework - CakePHP seems to be the route to go!

Tags: Ruby On Rails,CakePHP,MVC framework, Web Development, PHP Framework

Tags: Ruby On Rails,CakePHP,MVC frameworks, Web Development, PHP Framework

Just how much support does Ruby on Rails really have? And if you are looking at a PHP framework, which one is the most popular? 

If one does a simple Google search for Ruby on Rails you get over 30M results returned. This is quite staggering for a framework that is relatively new. So if you are looking for a framework that has a lot of support and information available on the Internet, you can't go wrong with RoR. However, if like me, you are looking at using a PHP framework, the choices can become a bit overwhelming.

http://www.phpwact.org/php/mvc_frameworks lists 40 PHP framewors. 

I took each of these frameworks and did a Google search to try and gauge how much support and buzz is given to the particular framework on the Internet. The results are summarized below. Firstly, I removed all frameworks with less than 100 000 results, since the graph became too big to be legible. And frankly, if a framework search returns less than 100 000 results the chances that you are going to be able to find the information and support that you are going to need to build even a hobby application is going to be very slim. The frameworks returning less than 100 000 results were:

 The frameworks with more than 100 000 results are displayed below. From these results we can see that CakePHP has the most results returned with about 2.3M results, followed by Symfony, with about 2M results.  

 

Some people might feel that this is not a valid way to decide which framework to use. For example, but about the fact that there might be a brilliant framework out there, but due to the fact that it is brand new, it only shows a couple of results in the search engines. Unfortunately, the facts are:

1. The documentation is never enough. Face it, we are dealing here with Open Source enthusiasts whose main interest is to CODE something. Documentation is what happens somewhere in a hellish afterlife for BAD PROGRAMMERS.

The only way to get real support and information when you are stuck with something is often not the formal documentation, but to call on the community - Google the problem or look for a tutorial done by someone else who had the same problem, or ask for help on a forum.

2. If you have ever worked in a big corporate and were involved in any type of product selection, you will know that it is NOT always the 'best' product that wins. It is the one with the best after-sales support and the company with the best perceived stability. I worked in bank, and the motto was: "You can never go wrong with IBM". Pulling this through to the Open Source environment, 'best after sales support' equates to 'best open source community support'.

Conclusion:

If you are prepared to learn the new language and put up with the fact that you are restricted in terms of hosting options, then Ruby is definitely the way to go. If you are looking at sticking with PHP and choosing a framework that is easy to install, runs on PHP 4 and PHP 5, has lots of community support - CakePHP is the way to go.

You can also read my other entry on the exact criteria that I used to select CakePHP for web development here, or read more about our specific web development services here

Tags: Ruby On Rails,CakePHP,MVC frameworks, Web Development, PHP Framework

Audience Level : Joomby  

Menus in Joomla can sometimes be pretty mysterious - I think this is because they are managed from two different places at the moment (this is in Joomla up to version 1.0.11). These are the Menu Manager, and the Module Manager.

Audience Level : Joomby  

The great thing about Joomla is that there are literally thousands (well OK, over a thousand) add-ons available. At the moment they are still divided into three different categories, Components, Modules and Plugins (previously called Mambots). These are three very different types of animals and if you try and install a module as a component you will pick up an error.

Let's look at the distinction between these three again and then look at how to install them. We will also look at how to give your Joomla site an instant overhaul and facelift by installing a new template.

But there are a lot of misconceptions about the terminology that is used when people talk about Web traffic statistics. I am therefore going to:

• Discuss the terminology
• Make some suggestions as to which Web Stats package to use for web site analysis
• Make some suggestions on how to utilize your web statistics to gain a better understanding of how your website work (or doesn't work)