Lately I see perilous situation in software development area. There are plenty of good devs so much bounded to tools. By tools, I mean mostly frameworks. I would like to elaborate a bit about that, but those are my personal opinions and they aren’t here to offend anyone.
First of all, we all need to admit, that quality of modern MVC framework raised a lot, comparing with state of things few years ago. Speaking about PHP – at the time, when I attracted my attention to this language, there were pure wilderness. We did not have any strong framework (unlike Ruby On Rails, which were sine qua non choice for Ruby web development). That caused multiple projects development, some of them are dead now (or should be), some hasn’t got good market adaptation and some of them are industry leaders at the moment (Symfony and Zend).
On the other hand, there’s huge temptation to write own frameworks, ignoring the great work of community. That has some advantages, in case you know exactly what you’re doing. Only one good reason for me is performance concerns. But still, doing everything by hand proves lack of understanding of tools and leads to giant problems with system maintenance. For me, it’s hard to imagine how one could create a complex system without usage of good framework. What’s more, its economically unreasonable to recreate the code, that already exists.
Alright, it’s clear – applications which will serve their purpose are way easier to be created with modern framework. The choice isn’t easy (as well as choice of language), but if you ask me, I’ll say: pick the one you feel the most comfortable with and which is built on top of best design patterns. A framework won’t do the job by its own, though. And this is the point I’d like to make: don’t be bound to the framework. The best quote to reflect this point of view is:
The architecture of an accounting app should scream “accounting” not Spring & Hibernate.
Robert C. Martin via https://twitter.com/unclebobmartin/status/118365858581069824
By decoupling from framework (see Jakub Zalas slides) you’ll benefit in multiple ways: your code will be loosely coupled, easier to understand, readable, testable and most important: it will be robust. If for some reason, you’ll have to change framework (because yours isn’t supported any more and super 3rd edition of famous framework comes to general availability), you’ll spend considerably less amount of time to migrate to new libraries.
A thing to remember is, that good software design practices, such as design patterns or SOLID principles, exists for years now. They are applied in all software languages and you’ll find similar concepts both in Java Spring and PHP Symfony. Frameworks, on the other hand comes and goes. In 3 years from now, there won’t be Symfony2 or Zend Framework2, but your code will be still alive and need to be maintained. It’s your choice, if it be completely dependent on framework or if it will rely on proven patterns.
I strongly encourage to read and apply philosophy of Domain Driven Design. It’s better to focus on a core domain and reflect business needs by modelling them with code. Once you’ll be focused on domain, you’ll start to see that framework is only implementation detail and you’ll stop calling yourself Symfony Developer or Zend Developer, but rather Software Developer.
Kanał ATOM
