I don’t take time to read novels very often so when I do I make sure it comes highly recommended. I just finished reading this book and loved it. Swedish author Stieg Larsson pulled off a coup when you think about it. The book has a Swedish setting with Swedish characters and yet became popular enough in the US to get a Hollywood movie. The other element that must have been fun to write is one of the hero characters is a professional writer himself.
I’m looking forward to watching the movie and reading the sequel.
When I developed my first commercial website about a decade ago there were no decent website development frameworks like Symfony so I created my own. It even had a simple ORM known simply as the Entity class. It made the rest of the development effort faster and more scalable.
My decision was informed by a masters in computer science and 15 years of software development projects. I knew good architecture was crucial for complex projects. It might have been one of the most important things we did to make New Afternic a success in the beginning.
However, when I recently discovered Symfony I was thrilled. Symfony is like a Cadillac Escalade, fully loaded, compared to my Yugo. I had considered learning a new language (Ruby) just to get a good framework, but Symfony seemed to offer a framework similar to Ruby’s but using PHP.
After using it for a over a month now, I can say that Symfony really does include all the features I wanted and more. It is well organized. And it seems pretty stable. However, if I started this project over from scratch, I’d strongly consider switching to Ruby for one reason alone: documentation. The documentation is scattered in tutorials, APIs, YML file references, plugin references, Doctrine website APIs, Doctrine YML file references, etc. And worst of all, none of it is complete.
Let me give a recent example. Say you’re working on your schema and you’re defining a special column so you wonder what are the valid options for specifying a column? I still don’t know where to find documentation that answers that straightforward question.
Its hard to complain about an otherwise fantastic framework that is free, but I hate to see such a brilliant project and so much hard work fail to get adopted faster due to a problem that is so much easier to fix than developing the framework in the first place. Complete some documentation. In my humble opinion as a newbie, documentation is by far its biggest weakness.
