On a seperate project from the PEAR work I’ve been doing of late, I’ve just rewritten an earlier project to use the Prado framework. I spent some time a while back looking at various frameworks, and in the end came down to a choice between Symfony and Prado. Because of the way this current project works, I thought Prado’s event-driven model was an easier fit than Symfony’s MVC model. Mind you, for other projects (including the one I was using PEAR for), I think Symfony would be ideal (and I didn’t use it earlier only because of time pressure).
Happily, the front-end of the project I was refactoring into Prado had no work done on it at all (the previous version was effectively a proof-of-concept with all the work in the back end). Still though, if I had to do it over, I’d probably quote an extra week and rewrite the whole thing from scratch using ActiveRecord instead of the custom database interaction I had in this version.
Some of the stuff in Prado isn’t quite as optimal as I’d hoped, mind. For example, nesting templates in Prado doesn’t work fully in that if you have Template C nested in Template B nested in Template A, then a variable in Template A is not visible at all to Template C, and the code attached to Template C can’t change it. So you have to have a TContentPlaceholder in Template A and a TContent linked to that in Template B, containing a TContentPlaceholder which a TContent in Template C links to and that TContent in Template C contains the actual content. It’s suboptimal and messy, because you’re effectively doing inheritance on a pseudo-object by hand, and typos can waste lots of your time, not to mention the headache of keeping it … Read the rest
