Benefits of migrating my work to a new web development framework?
- by John
When I first started programming with PHP, I was ignorant of other php frameworks (like code igniter, cake php, etc...). So I fell into the trap of re-inventing wheels, which had the benefit of being "fun" and "educational".
Overtime, I discovered other open source products that I found useful, like smarty templating engine, jquery library, tcpdf library, fdf etc...so I started bundling these technologies along with things I've built over the years into a LAMP development framework to make life easier for myself.
This pass year, I've been having fun developing on the code igniter framework. It does many of the things I do in my framework. Coding in CI feels natural because the MVC and ORM feels similar to the MVC and ORM of my framework. So now I'm contemplating migrating a lot of the plugins in my framework over to CI. The pros and cons I can think of for such a project are:
Pros:
benefit from the vast community of CI developers
lots of other developers will be familiar with it
better documentation
Cons:
I've built a lot of useful plugins against my own framework, and it will take a lot of time to move even just the essential ones
at the moment, I still, work faster against my own framework than CI, just because I'm more familiar with it
even if I did migrate to CI, there will always be newer and better frameworks in the near future, and i'll be contemplating this scenario again
So my question is the following: perhaps I should leave my old framework as is, and for each new project I receive, I make a decision on whether the requirements are best served by developing with CI or my own framework. Is this the right approach?
