Discussions and Comments

Xeoncross at 1:04 pm on Jan 23, 2009

Hey, nice library you have here. If it was just another MVC I would skip it - but because you broke it up into classes I can now freely use it on the other systems and sites I build.

Good work, I just need to test your code now.

AppBeacon at 3:57 pm on Feb 18, 2009

Dang! This sure did cause a stir on the CI forums.

Thanks for your amazing effort with flourish. You've put a lot of work into this.

I'm on the fence about using it for a project with my "real" job. When I first started this job, I evaluated many frameworks and could not get over their Model limitations. It seems most of them were designed for development from scratch. I couldn't figure out anyway to integrate them into the existing DBs I've inherited. If an existing DB does not meet their schema requirements, you're out of luck.

After looking at flourish a little bit, it seems quite a bit less restrictive as far as the database is concerned.

However, flourish still causes me the same concerns I have with using frameworks. I'm not a php expert. I'd say I'm a mid-level developer. I feel that using frameworks and libraries will result in me not becoming a better PHP developer. In fact, I think it might cause me to become LESS skilled in PHP. When looking for jobs, employers generally are looking for someone that is really good at PHP. I've never seen anyone looking for a flourish developer and few are looking for CakePHP or CI developers.

What are your thoughts on this?

wbond at 3:31 pm on Mar 1, 2009

@AppBeacon

I apologize, it appears that I'm not getting emails when people leave comments on blogs. I've fixed that now.

I've heard your concerns a number of times from other developers throughout my career. The question is what you want to focus on in your development. You won't have time to be really good at everything, so what do you want to do? Do you want to run a business and get a project done? Do you want to make really easy-to-use sites with great interfaces? Do you want to be an expert PHP developer and be able to scale sites up to millions of users?

Based on your goals, using a framework or something like Flourish may or may not be a good thing. If you want to get something up really fast and aren't too concerned about having to do stuff a prescribed way, frameworks will get you there the fastest. Something like Flourish is a bit more modular, so there aren't command line tools to automatically scaffold out all of your models and interfaces. However, if you need to bend things later on, something like Flourish will probably be easier to adapt to your needs.

If your goal is to become a PHP expert, picking a non-trivial project and seeing it through from beginning to end is the best way. You don't need to create another framework or general purpose library, unless you see unfulfilled gaps in current offerings. Instead you could develop a new tool. Recently I saw a blog post lamenting the fact that there isn't an awesome PHP database migrations library. A project like that would expose you to all kinds of databases and you'd have to write lots of new and challenging code.

In terms of finding a job with a specific technology, I would probably steer clear. Most of the job posts mentioning a specific framework are gonna be a different kind of job than a job post looking for someone with varied PHP or programming experience. A focus on a single framework skill-set seems short-sighted since frameworks will change and code will be updated - the most important thing is having a developer who can get his hands dirty when appropriate, or use other code when it's the right situation.

justbn at 11:34 pm on Jun 8, 2009

NOTE : I'm actually "AppBeacon" as well. I just realized I shouldn't be plastering my pet project's name on everyone else's sites! Sorry!

See my response to my original comment above at : http://flourishlib.com/discussion/2/94

Thanks, Justin