Today I came across a del.icio.us link from Jonathon Snook about how Mambo will be integrating Cake PHP for version 5.0. I wasn’t able to find a development time line but did come across some other interesting news.

The team has spent a considerable amount of time working on XHTML validation, WCAG 1.0 (Priority 1, 2, and some 3), removal of unnecessary and/or inaccessible JavaScript code, improved usability, plus much more.
from "Baking Mambo" written by Chad Auld

I hope that 4.7 comes out soon and that the work indicated by the preceding quote actually makes a difference. It would be great to see a success for Mambo that causes a cascade of other CMSs to follow suit.

Magic in programming is nothing new, every time you use a library you are expecting it to perform the job correctly. You don’t know how it does this and if it fails you don’t know how to fix it. Don’t get me wrong, I love libraries and believe they make our lives thousands of times easier. I do, however, promote the idea of understanding everything possible about a system before turning it loose in a production environment. We’ve all been bitten by the devil in the details, guaranteed.

Today it seems that frameworks are becoming the way of the future for web development. The complexity of reliable cross-browser JavaScript has made it near impossible too know enough to write your own robust AJAX application so prototype and script.aculo.us just make sense. Ruby on Rails is the framework that seems to be the run away favourite with certain groups and is constantly being mentioned on digg, slashdot and others. Recently I have been looking into learning symfony a PHP Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework.

Frameworks utilize magic very heavily as I have come to learn in the last week. When you create a new project using symfony you first create a directory for it on your web server then you run three commands. The first generates the project, the second generates the application and the third generates a module within the application. Each command generates a host of directories and files auto-magically. This is where my comfort level drops to zero. Once I learn a bit more about how everything works and what files do what, when I will gain some comfort but currently it looks insurmountable.

• Over the next few weeks (maybe months) I will be testing various frameworks in a VM on my machine to see which are best for web applications. I expect to find a few different ones that will meet my needs in different ways but it should be interesting. My criteria are pretty loose I am big on the “feel” of a tool which is hard to quantify.
• It needs to be able to work well with JavaScript and XMLHttpRequest (AJAX)
• MySQL and other databases at a higher level than PHP does natively
  (connection pooling, caching, etc.)
• Easily allow for the heavy use of standards such as CSS, XHTML, microformats, etc.
• Actively maintained and improved
• Simple but flexible syntax/structure
• Able to be installed on a web hosting service

Over the next few years I expect to start doing business on the internet by offering services from standard application development, to web application development (my main focus), to web site design and hosting. Finding the right tool for the job now will make this process seamless and allow me to build up a toolkit for the future. By the way, if you have need for any of the services I mentioned just drop me an email. I am not taking on any large projects within the next year just simple sites and small applications.

The first framework I am going to check out is symfony which has been reviewed by many to be the best available currently. After that I am going to try CakePHP which is also well reviewed. It is used by Jonathon Snook of snook.ca whose blog I link in my “Worthy Blogs” section. If you have a favorite let me know in the comments.