What better way is there for actually comparing the frameworks than to actually build a project in it? The problem with this is finding the time to actually do it. I figure a good place to start is to actually lay out the plan.

The plan for testing frameworks is to build a small web app using several popular frameworks (though by no means exhaustive):

• Zend Framework (PHP)
• Pylons (Python)
• Django (Python)
• Ruby on Rails (Ruby)
• ASP.NET MVC (C#)

I don’t promise to actually use them in that order; that’s just part of what I was thinking. There’s also odd ones like Turbinado which is written in Haskell which is a purely functional language as well as having some pretty cool other features which I would like to look at even in its reasonably young state. If you have any others that you think should be looked at, I’m happy to consider them. (Notably not mentioned is anything written in java. That’s due to my not seeing a lot of people who are flocking to java web development. In general, people write java web apps either because they really only know java and do not want to have to learn another language before learning web development (which is very reasonable), they just really love java, or the group they are working with already have a java site which they are then contributing to. If you think it is worth investigating, I’m ok with it though not as a primary interest).

The actual project is supposed to help to show strengths and weaknesses to the frameworks. As such, I want a vaguely realistic project that is still small so I am not tied up in these for very long. That in and of itself creates a somewhat large problem that I want to talk to though won’t exactly demonstrate: how the frameworks work on large projects. Many webapps really are small overall. I’m not trying to say that’s a bad thing, but it is true. That said, many projects that might not be so public or conversely the ones that get very large can be seen as very large projects. I think both perspectives are important to observe though a large project is non trivial to devote my free time to for investigation so I will try to consider.

The project I want to propose will have an initial idea and then be updated twice. At every stage, I am going to try to develop it in generally the most naive and non-scaling way (that is still reasonable). This is to mainly evaluate how much effort will be needed to update and change the application.

The application is supposed to be a polling application (for whatever reason). We want to be able to make a poll that poses some question to uses and has a list of options. Users can select a single option and the results are displayed visually. No user accounts are needed and we’ll just use ip’s to stop multiple votes. We also want to have unit tests and validation on data.

We will then add the first update to add comments because obviously people have input that they want to give. We want simple threaded comments with a captcha and a bad-word filter (with unit tests and validation).

We now have too many users and comments for the admin to always be around to deal with everything. Our common users also are annoyed at having to enter a captcha all the time. In response, we will implement user accounts that need email validation and the concept of other administrators, moderators (just able to delete comments) and normal users who can vote and comment.

This is a fairly small application but not completely trivial. For each framework, I’m going to try to follow the “proper” way of making it. This means that I’m using the components that it ships with unless changing it would be relatively trivial and any installed updates/add ons are at most dropped in a directory rather than me having to modify too much generated code. That does mean that things such as PHP’s PEAR, Python’s easy_install, Ruby’s gems, and just adding dll’s for C# is all perfectly valid.

If you have any input about this project, please leave a comment. I would love to know if you think it’s a good idea, bad idea, is missing something or whatever your feed back is. Also, your own comments on any framework is very encouraged. I am not sure when this project will go through, but I hope to be generally done within the next month.

I’ve taken to running svn releases of WordPress. I don’t exactly have a good reason, but it does seem to make themes not work right. (I tried to use two different themes because i’ve been doing a lot with dark backgrounds and light text recently. it went poorly). On the bright side, the new interfaces seem slick and the updates are easier using straight svn access.

For development, I’ve come to find that I’m either in vim or Visual Studio 2008. That’s pretty much the two ends of the spectrum of light and generic program to highly customized and heavy for development. I’ve been doing some development with C#.net and really have to say it’s fun. I love programming in it probably more than any other language. I’m enjoying the environment too. I admit, I kind of miss my vim key bindings and jumping into normal mode to move around, but it’s not all bad. The code completion and intellisense is great in VS2008. The debugger for applications in extremely nice to step through whatever has gone wrong. I really must say that I miss those capabilities when I’m writing something else.

Also, since I mentioned running light text on a dark background, I would suggest altering your theme (if your window manager supports that) to light-on-dark. It’s very nice on my eyes and you can find great places where only backgrounds or foregrounds were specified, making them unreadable! Well, at least it encourages you to think about what happens when someone does try to use high contrast light-on-dark settings with your program/web site. Accessibility forever.

I’m going to be honest. I enjoy writing web apps. I really enjoy the back end code and the product at the end. I have done pretty much everything of significance in PHP also. This shouldn’t offend anyone yet, but some people might see PHP and think less of me. And the real question becomes why?

Now I’ve asked a lot of my friends this question. The general answer usually comes down to PHP yielding bad code or being unmaintainable. Um… I don’t think that’s PHP’s fault that the last person who worked on this project kinda hacked it together into somewhat working but terrible shape. Most if not all programming languages allow you to write bad or unmaintainable code (purely functional languages might be the exception, but my experience with them is far too limited to be able to comment). To be quite honest, I don’t have a problem maintaining my php code. Larger projects always have a framework (one I made usually) to power them and small scripts can easily be navigated by using find in the file or scrolling.

Well Rails and Django are amazing frameworks. This may or may not be true. Rails does have a lot of cool features. It is even cooler when you start giving it extra gems. I’ll give it that, but even that isn’t good enough for me. If you actually want to start using more complicated conditions, you end up writing the SQL you were looking to avoid. Something like Symfony provides most if not all of the commonly requested features for php. There are many other frameworks available too. So if one isn’t good enough, you can always try another.

PHP is slow. To be honest, PHP is usually not where scripts end up being slow. I frequently see one of the following: 1) Are you having PHP do calculations that your database could easily do? Why would you do that? 2) Are you having PHP parse pages that are static or virtually static? Why not use server side includes and not even use the php parse? 3) Did you make a huge data structure that you are recreating on every call? Look into functional programming or restful programming (both are stateless) and consider revising your code.

And in the end, PHP has a lot of well known ways to speed it up. Why not try out a caching solution? memcache is nice and well supported. You could even implement your own.

Are there any reasons to use PHP, not just defend it? YES! Plenty. Integrating kerberos authentication is extremely easy. There is a wealth of information about any common task. the PEAR/PECL code is common and usually easy to use. The wealth of code already available makes it a simple choice.

I admit that both this is not terribly easy to set up nor is it terribly hard. You have to modify 1 php file and include the required components on your web page. There is a full readme enclosed to help you get it set up.

If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment!

Download the code

On a lighter note, I just got a new PMP: a Cowon D2. I also will give some feedback on that and give a link to the excellent review I read before purchasing (I need to get it out of my history at home). Hopefully all that tonight.

Also, Freefalling into Freedom (on chilloutmixes.com) is a great mix. The use of kettle was somewhat surprising but very well done. Check it out.

The tutorials are coming later still. I hope to finish them … um.. maybe by tuesday. So just hang in there! I made the reward better in compensation for the delay and will make it easier to get even without doing the optional third demo. Sorry for the delay.

Also, there is a new mix from Cardamar available. Honestly, i haven’t even listened to the full thing yet, so head over to chilloutmixes.com and check it out.

Also, I just got Cardamar‘s latest CD. I need to write a review on that as well. There was a new mix released by Marco Torrance in the past couple weeks also, so be sure to check out chillout mixes if you haven’t recently.

That’s all i can say for now.