On Frameworks

Martin Fowler, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture:

I'm assuming that most of my readers will fall into two groups: those with modest needs who are looking to build their own software and readers with more demanding needs who will be using a tool. … There is a third category; those with demanding needs who want to build their own software. The first thing I'd say here is to look carefully at using tools. I've seen more than one project get sucked into a long exercise at building frameworks, which wasn't what the project was really about.

I have been acutely aware of this, lately. The specific sorts of patterns I'm looking for (e.g. active record) could be done for me, were I to use a framework. There's a lot to weigh:

• Increased difficulty of maintenance as we complement our own set of home-grown, evolved tools with third-party tools. All the old code doesn't just go away.
• Training new and existing developers in a specific toolset (though in theory this would offset some of our own documentation requirements)
• Finding a tool that actually fits our needs (Zend, Lithium, Doctrine, CodeIgniter, Kohana,  etc.)

My impression is that Zend would most easily fit into our existing development. We could cherry-pick components, increasing our dependence as we grow in comfort and retire old home-grown tools. Maybe the same is true for other projects. I'd love to build a simple project using each of these tools, to really get a feel for their ins and outs.

At some level, I'm just tired of writing simple SQL statements.