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Comment by ldite | Hacker News Reader

Summary; I don't like frameworks, so I rolled my own framework.

Summary: I didn't understand how to use a framework, so I rolled my own one that doesn't really do much.

Why carry around the weight of a framework if you're happier doing things this way? Insofar as an idea on putting together a sane PHP project built from the ground up, I think it's a good article.

What 'weight'? A good framework doesn't stand in your way, it lets u focus on business logic solutions instead of repeatable tasks.

Sooner or later he'll discover that he's getting to the point where he needs to provide solutions for problems that are already solved by a variety of well-maintained toolsets, and the lack of abstraction will make his projects hard to develop further.

I've personally never encountered a PHP framework that meets that definition.

I never would have dreamed that I'd ever see someone on Hacker News type out English's second person personal pronoun as "u".

Maybe it's got sth to do with that stick up your ass.

Miss the point more?

I don't think he's really missing the point. This guy complains that he's always re-implementing the stuff that frameworks don't provide... but all of the stuff he talks about is just the basic features that every framework provides. He'd still have to develop those features on top of his homegrown framework.

I think it is more accurate to say he wrote his own library.

These terms are not well defined (AFAIK) but often a framework implies that you have something “already running” which you customize by providing callbacks, delegates, and similar.

With a library you have a set of reusable functions and data types (classes).

I think an Apple engineer referred to frameworks as “the hollywood model: don’t call us, we call you”.

For PHP programmers that dislike the framework model, have a look at http://flourishlib.com/ — been mentioned on HN before but I hadn’t seen it before this week. In philosophy this is exactly how I prefer a good library of re-usable code: lots of self-contained functions and data structures which each solve a problem, and you decide when to use what.

Yes, I think a huge part of the problem wih frameworks for a lot of programmers, myself included, is a lack of control. The framework takes control and you have a certain set of ways to modify its behavior. If what you need to do isn't something the framework designers had in mind, you may have to hack the framework. Even if it is something they had in mind, it can be much slower to hunt around and find the 'right' way to tell the framework to stop doing this automatic thing and do this other thing instead. It is often much faster for an experienced and skilled developer to write something that just does what they need to begin with.

Libraries, OTOH, don't presume anything about taking control. You're still the driver, they just have a lot of things that can make your life easier if you choose to use them.

A friend of mine does software consulting for medical groups. He rolled his own framework which is a combination of SQL Server and ASP classic.

The funny thing is that it was the SQL Server stored procedures that generated the HTML, not ASP. I couldn't figure out if it was genius or insane.

It was insane.

Summary: I don't like frameworks, so I traveled back in time and created CakePHP 0.9.

Really, I'm sure no one remembers CakePHP back then (they had not the pretty site yet) but was pretty much this.

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