Not that the other thread hasn’t been an absolute joy to follow, I am very curious to get opinions regarding whether today’s major frameworks are beneficial when developing an enterprise class application.
To help keep this thread on topic, here is some clarification on some terms which may come in to use in this discussion:
Major Frameworks - Actively developed, active community, published documentation - examples include e.g. Symfony2, Laravel, Zend Framework 2, etc. (looking at members of the PHP FIG might provide a good starting point for examples)
Enterprise Applications - Business critical (e.g. the business is wholly dependent on the application functioning correctly and being available), reliable, performant, scalable
Modern - Takes advantage of modern features of the language (e.g. opcode caching, etc) as well as providing consistent functionality to support modern user habits (mobile/tablet, REST, etc), unit tested
Here’s some background as to why I am curious about this:
For the last several years, I have worked full time for a company providing a SAAS application to clients in the healthcare industry. We work within a custom made application framework. While the custom framework has met our needs to this point, we are tasked with meeting every challenge provided by the modern world on our own (security threats, changes in user habits, etc). As one of the benefits of using a framework is the ability to leverage the work of dozens (potentially hundreds or more) of other developers’ to help solve our challenges, we are certainly interested in doing so.
Some of our concerns though revolve around things like:
- Flexibility - will we be able to respond to our customers’ needs within the same timeframes
- Scalability - will we be limited in our ability to onboard new clientele
- Performance - will there be a significant reduction in the efficiency of our hardware and other resources
If you have experience using a framework in an enterprise application setting, can you provide your thoughts regarding that, both positive and negative, along with the framework(s) you’ve used and whether or not you would recommend using it for a project being started today?