I know PHP and am just beginning with MySql (but plan to use ODBC). I don’t need any books explaining that.
I am probably qualified to develop a simple web site, but aim at taking on quite ambitious apps. I imagine that almost all web apps have some commonality like security, scalability, etc (I have absolutely no idea how to distribute a data base or an app over server servers, for instance).
Since I can’t foresee the exact nature of the applications which I might develop (other than that PHP & ODBC will be involved), is there any point in getting married to a framework, or should I just reinvent the wheel and personalize it to make it my own framework.
If an existing framework, then which one? The only help I can give is that I am not likely to do websites, portals, shoppings sites, etc, probably leaning more to asset tracking and data mining.
Using a framework saves you a ton of time and helps you to organise your app mroe logically.
If the app is small then frameworks like CodeIgniter or Kohana are ideal.
If you are building a bigger app that needs to scale the Symfony or possiby Zend are the ones to look at.
If you were to start your app in Symfony you would instanly get:
Plus the whole framework is extendable and custmisable to suit your needs.
Starting without a framework you’d have to write all of this yourself. Or integrate several disparate open source modules.
Hope this helps.