Sunday, August 26, 2007

Seagull Framework

I've started working on a website for selling cars person to person. Hardly an original concept, but one that still has a lot of potential. What's neat is I'm able to build it without relying on a single Microsoft application. I started trying out a framework called Zoop which has a lot of potential, but unfortunately is not mature enough to be usable. Do to some very problematic bugs, that I could not get timely enough information on I had to leave this framework behind. I settled on the Seagull framework based on its feature set. I was pleasantly suprised to find out the missing feature that Zoop had on Seagull, AJAX, actually is included in the framework. Which means that Seagull is the most fully featured framework on the market that I know of.

Of course it is open source, licensed under the BSD license. I personally don't have a problem with this particular license. I know some folks do, but hey different opinions are what make the world turn. Diversity of vision, and opinion is also the reason there is so much excellent software available in the open source world.

As for the feature set:

It's compatible with either PHP4 or PHP 5, it has a content management system built in, it has ORM capabilities built in (this gives it an edge over Zoop), multiple templating engines are available (zoop only uses smarty), it uses the Model/View/Controller, can handle mutiple databases (which was essential for this project, as it will need to be scalable), database objects, caching (once again you can pick from a few engines based on your needs), validation, as mentioned previously AJAX, authentication, and many, many more modules such as rss feeds, feedback, just to name a couple.

Overall it has the most features out of the 15 frameworks I considered for my project. I was thoroughly impressed with the documentation, and the maturity of the project. I was able to develop a sample application is less than 5 minutes. It's the easiest to use framework I've ever worked with. In fact, it was a breath of fresh air from my J2EE development with Struts.

In my next post I'll talk about my integrated development environment that I'm using. The amazing Quanta Plus.

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