After my first project had been completed I had some time to reflect and plan for the next one. During some casual tech related browsing I stumble upon a thing called Ruby on Rails which various people praised on their blogs as the holy savior so I decided to try it out. Doing the setup, installing the gems, running the scaffolding script, and finally viewing the result in the browser… Holy shit! It was already basically there, a simple site that would be easy to manipulate to actually accomplish the needed logic and look, for any kind of project!

I knew that this was what I wanted in php so I quickly started shopping around for a php version. God no no no there were over 10 of them, all claiming to be the RoR killer. There was no way I would be able to actually test all of them before the next project so I just picked the Zend Framework which seemed like a serious effort. The framework claimed to be light which also was what I wanted. I quickly made it more heavyweight in a way that works for me. This was accomplished by extending the controller class and the model class. I still use smarty for the view because I’m so used to smarty now that I couldn’t live without it, plus it is still company regulations to use it so I don’t really have a choice.

And there it is, the final level, a rough estimate is that with level 2 style coding you max out with a 50/50 scenario, if you really push it, between project specific code and general code that can be used over and over again with no modifications. My estimate with level 3 style coding is 30/70 which is a huge improvement.