When we are beginners in the implementation of web applications, we believe that we are the best, that our programs are better than other even we venture to say that source code was never better than ours, but… that’s not true!
In recent days somebody ask me why we should use a framework to create websites or web applications; to answer this question I let several points to consider:
- First, frameworks are robust platforms created by people with much more experience than us, therefore frameworks are excellent opportunities to learn from the great programmers!
- Frameworks include a set of components, helpers, plugins, theming systems, etc. that help us to create a web application in a few hours. Even there are frameworks called full-stack frameworks that let us implement a project with almost none configuration.
- With a framework we have already many complex functionalities -for a beginner- like: session management, cache, input validation, user administration, database access by using an object-relational mapping engine and one of the most important features of any application web: security.
- If you use a framework, you’ll save up time, money and exertion!
- You’ll have a lot of official and non-official documentation, user communities, blogs, IRC channels, books and quick notes, these are good resources to increase your knowledge about the framework that you are interested in.
- Also a good new for you is that there are a lot of open-source frameworks (particularly those are created using PHP), so you won’t have any problem to find the appropiated framework that it will do you happy! Only for mention a few of frameworks we have:
- Zend
- CodeIgniter
- CakePHP
- Symphony
- Yii
- …
- You can find a great list and comparative in this link: http://www.phpframeworks.com/
Important! I am not saying that you should not do your projects “from scratch”, I am inviting to learn a lot of things and good practices. Later when you have more experience, maybe you could contribute with other projects or create your own platforms to sell o to give to the community (to say “thank you very much!”)