- How do you deal with quickly-morphing PHP frameworks when some applications tend to stay in production for years at a time? - Do any of you have a good experience with a framework that ages well?
As others have pointed out, the more abstracted a given foundation is, the faster it changes. C code pretty much works the same way it did 10 years ago. PHP 5.3 is quite a bit different than the PHP3 code I wrote years ago. Frameworks (I've used Zend and CakePHP) change even faster - the code I wrote last year for Cake or Zend is quite a bit different than the code I write today. This causes an issue with applications that have a long life-span. They age very poorly. You basically have two choices: 1. Upgrade your application to fit new framework API changes. This leads to an inordinate amount of time upgrading, which means less time you can devote to actually improving the application itself. You're stuck upgrading existing functionality broken by new upgrades. In my experience, frameworks tend to be brittle. 2. Don't upgrade. You may miss out on security fixes or new functionality. You may even have to patch the framework code to fix security issues without breaking other functionality, which means now you have undocumented changes. Documentation for past frameworks may even be difficult to find (assuming it's even online). How do you guys handle this? - Brian -- realm3 web applications realm3.com/ twitter.com/brian_dailey/ p: 917-512-3594 f: 440-744-3559 _______________________________________________ New York PHP User Group Community Talk Mailing List http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php
