I’ve always admitted I’m somewhat slow off the mark when it comes to adopting essential skill sets. While I do a good job identifying great tools and practices before the really become popular, I myself can’t seem to get around to actually LEARNING how to put the newly acquired tool set into practice. But, that’s changing soon enough.

So let’s pick up where I left off more than a year ago.  To review, there has been a proliferation of frameworks of all kinds throughout the web development community.  If you’re coding PHP, then you must have heard of Zend Framework, CakePHP, or CodeIgniter, to name a few.  For JavaScripters there’s Mootools, jQuery, Prototype, Dojo, and the list goes on.  Now, I’m no where close to being able to authentically provide a comparison and contrast report, but I’m starting to become attached to what’s working for me thus far.  My use and experience is by no means at a level of the gurus whose sites I’m visiting most often, or the sages who are writing great user manuals explaining why these frameworks do what they do. The bottom line, they make your experience coding more productive and fun, and make your web sites and applications useful on any browser.

For me, the concepts are starting to take root.  For PHP, its the realization that you will accumulate code over time and the older it gets the more it needs updating.  But, having a library of code handy saves me the time to have to rewrite it over and over again.  Sounds great if you’re already a programmer.  For us a little less seasoned, the learning curve can be daunting.  However, there’s no sympathy or slack for not wanting to learn the basics of the language you intend to employ in your web or application projects.  Better to know what’s in the ingredients than to serve your guest rubbish.

I’m continuing my PHP journey with CodeIgniter framework, mostly because I found its installation easy to implement and the User Guide, wiki, and tutorials helpful so far.   I’m sure I’ll get around to the Zend Framework due to it’s enormous popularity, corporate support, and training resources. There are many many open source alternatives as well, but we’ll tackle that another day.

In Part 3 (coming soon, I promise), I’ll have more to say about JavaScript frameworks.  At the moment, I have some books on Mootools from Apress, but I also have some great bookmarks for learning jQuery.  In a few days I should have a lot more to say about them, and possible something more interesting to say about PHP framworks.  Stay tuned.  And remember, “Code is Poetry.”