Sunday 9 May 2010

Bye-bye Symfony and Netbeans...

I can't believe that it's been almost six months since I last posted anything on this blog. How time flies when you are having fun!
A great deal has happened since my last post. Having written about the Symfony framework, I decided to abandon it after a few days, mainly because the documentation was somewhat lacking. Instead, I opted for the Zend Framework. After checking out a few online documents and buying a few books on OOP, I was away in next to no time.
I am running the latest version of the framework (1.10) on my development workstation and staging server and it is a very good development environment. Once a project is set up, it takes very little time to have a working website.
One area where it scores very highly is the creation of forms. The built-in validators for Zend_Form and Zend_Validate mean that it is easy to create a form which is fully validated when it is submitted to the server. Moreover, the forms should be more secure as there are validators to help stop XSS and SQL injection attacks.

On the subject of integrated development environments (IDEs), I decided to abandon Netbeans and go with Eclipse. There is nothing wrong with Netbeans per se, other than it ran very slowly on my workstation. Eclipse runs much more quickly and once I had got used to its user interface, I felt it was much better.
One thing that I really like is the way it integrates with my subversion server, so I can commit changes to the repository from Eclipse, without having to go into a separate shell. It saves time and encourages good practice.

All of this has meant that once we had agreed on the overall design, I have been able to make excellent progress with the website I am currently developing with a business associate. There is no doubt in my mind that the combination of an IDE like Eclipse and a programming framework like the Zend framework make a huge contribution to productivity and speed of delivery. That said, some of the modules in the framework can be a little hard to get going and it's often necessary to search the fora or google for solutions to problems. Overall though, it's definitely quicker than having to hand craft code.

2 comments:

  1. Personally, I see your desicion to change more related to lack of information online. I had same problem because symfony is not well documented and for complicated behavior the unique resource is to ask in the google forum and wait for days until someone answer. Anyway, there are other places like symfonyexperts dot com where you can pay for a quick response.

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  2. Hi, that's a pitty that you have abandoned the Symfony after a few days. The true is, that learning Symfony isn't so easy (reading many pages of documentation - there is a lot of, watching symfony google group). But after few weeks it's really great to develope applications with it.

    Personally I can't imagine my developing in PHP without Symofny now ;)

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