What are web frameworks?

Here at 9xb we’re always trying to find the best and most efficient way to build our projects. The way to achieve this is to have a powerful and solid framework in place. For that, we selected the Zend Framework.

Web frameworks are designed to reduce the overhead that comes with common activities performed during web development. They often include a set of components that allow developers to accomplish certain tasks in a matter of hours, rather than a few days if they were to write it themselves. While our developers are more than capable of writing these components themselves, their time would better be spent elsewhere on a project.

Some frameworks also put the foundations of a web application in place for you, allowing you to get on with actual build. Such foundations might include database interaction, session management (sessions are a semi-perminent dialogue between the user and the server, freqently used in online store baskets or “member only areas”), templating or error management. Frameworks also promote the use of DRY code, or “Don’t Repeat Yourself”. Even the not so computer literate can appreciate the absurdity of writing the same piece of software over and over again - it’s just not good working practice.

We analysed several PHP frameworks out in the wild, such as Symfony, CakePHP, CodeIgniter. While all of them are fantastic achievements in web technology, and all accomplish the same objective, we decided that Zend Framework was better suited to our needs. ZF is maintained by Zend, who are frequently referred to as ‘The PHP Company’. They employ people to make sure their framework is solid, error-free, up to date and competitive. They also offer training courses to quickly get up to speed on their framework - which is perfect for us.

To promote the use of this framework throughout 9xb we came up with ‘Zend Day’. A day where we split the studio team off in to three groups of designers and developers, and instructed them to build an web application in a day that must use one or more of, in some way or another, the following widely used online services:

- twitter
- flickr
- Amazon

To read more about Zend Day, view the article in our news section