Best framework?

leontius

Let's say that I'm going to create a facebook clone (or any big site if you like). Which framework do you think is the easiest to use? The framework doesn't have to be in PHP. The topic is about choosing a framework, so not using a framework is not an option.

The framework should be able to scale up, efficient, stable, and easy to work with. Community, documentation and being free / open source are huge pluses.

I only know about drupal and it's too high in level (because it is a CMS and a framework as well) so it's not easy to work with. One of my friend uses kohana but I never heard of it before Sad

What's you say? CodeIgniter? CakePHP? RoR? Django? Pylons? Struts?

Diablosblizz

Oh jeez, a facebook clone eh? Well, best of luck! In reality, PHP is probably the best bet. Of course, you want to know how you can choose. Well, think about what languages you know and how could you use them in your advantage. Facebook is coded in PHP, while MySpace is coded in ColdFusion (Adobe). Basically the best thing you should consider is what do YOU think you can use to make this clone? What's the best at doing so?

Also, if you're planning to do that and you get big you'll defiantly have to move away from FriHost.

rvec

Manofgames

I'd just like to start off by saying that you should not try and clone one of the big sites - they may look fairly simple on the surface but there's been a heck of a lot of work put in to get them to that stage.

Back on the subject of frameworks - I use Kohana a lot and I'd definitely recommend it; it's light-weight and easy to learn. The documentation isn't perfect, but if you invest a few hours in going through the core framework code you'll have a much deeper understanding of the system than any help guide could give you.

Codeigniter is good though it's not updated very often and is currently PHP4 bound. You'll also find that it's limitations (you can't extend the core classes transparently, there's no way to easily modularise code etc.) will drive you insane after a while, that said the documentation is very thorough and considered to be one of the best.

Cake & Symfony are both very big and prestigious frameworks - They've been around for a while and have got a lot of community backing. Cakephp has a lot of crazy functions though (e.g. e() as a shorthand for echo, even though loosing those extra characters doesn't actually make the code any more readable...). Whereas symfony seems big on the code generation front

leontius

albuferque

Just 3 magic words:

Ruby on Rails

windowlicker

I've got another 3 magic words for you:

Groovy and Grails

It use basicly groovy domain classes for holding data for the models. Grails support nicely and very clearly MVC architecture, it's dynamic and very efficient. Closers, which are the mian Groovy feature, are widely accepted by Java developers, and they will soon introduce it into Java following editions.

http://groovy.codehaus.org/
http://grails.org/

Hogwarts