I was at a PHP User Group meeting earlier this week where the presenter was extolling the virtues of the great Symfony MVC framework for PHP, which he started using last month. I've been experimenting with it for a few months longer and shared some of the same reactions when I first started a few experiments. I had to leave about thirty minutes in, and no doubt I missed some really hot PHP action, but there's another MVC I've been toying with recently, CodeIgnitor. Couple this with the javascript framework Prototype, and the possibilities are not just endless... they're really *^%&%$# fast.
That's my major complaint with untweaked Symfony projects - speed. CodeIgnitor, while it requires you to CODE a bit more (than in Symfony) to accomplish your (same) goals, is blazing. What Prototype gives you is a means by which you can get fast responses on the page (AJAX functionality). This, when you think about making on-screen updating of information *even faster* than conventional PHP, is an amazing concept.
Anyway, I'm working on something that I hope to Beta in a few weeks using this dynamic duo. It'll be a Web app that works well in mobile browsers, including BlackBerry devices complying with the RIM cHTML constraints. And it'll be smokin' fast.
