Samurai Coder

At work, I’m an entry-level PHP-MySQL developer. Currently, my skills are fairly limited. In terms of databasing, I will keep on learning MySQL from performansing to system maintainance. PostgreSQL has become less and less popular, and Oracle sounds, to me, something very exceptional and isn’t open source.

However, other than database, I’m not clear about where I go. At least, for now, I want to learn every bit of PHP 5, which is the version I am using at work. The language choice dosn’t solve my concern. What I need to do during my exploration of PHP is that I need to learn object orientation and model-view-control frameworks. My current plan is to go with PEAR and Smarty.

As I use classes/objects in PEAR, I will learn how to use PEAR. At this moment, my use of PEAR is very passive. I’m not able to create classes with inheritance. PEAR is like a library of methods rather than classes to me. My use of PEAR is mostly copy-and-paste. But, I hope that using PEAR deepens my understanding of object-oritented programming. (Also, object-orientation is built-in to languages like Objective-C and Ruby, both of which I expand my knowledge about in the near future).

Well, object-orientation only doesn’t bring us to make better web apps. Next up, yes, frameworks. Separation of logic and view is essential to create apps faster and better. Recently, we saw two major frameworks getting more and more popular on a daily basis. CakePHP and Symfony. I’m not familiar with the difference between them, but both provide solid foundations for model-view-controller architecture. Surely, Ruby on Rails may be more sophisticated and well grounded. For the time being, there is no plan adopt Rails as a web framework in my workplace. (hint, hint, hire me if you’re interested.) Even though popularity of PHP is going downwards, it’s the tool I use in order to bring home the bacon. Selecting which framework now might not be my priority. Both CakePHP and Symfony are likely to be fairly challenging. I want to start with somehting more readily usable by someone like me. So now, Smarty. Yes, Smarty is not exactly based on MVC architecture, but it’s still, I believe, a good start.

Getting down to OOP with PEAR and MVC with Smarty, I hope I will be more prepared to consider my future skill and career. I, as a developer, would like to establish my skills with at least Objective-C/Cocoa and one well-formed MVC framework like CakePHP, Symfony, Rails, Django and Catalyst.

Any comments are appreciated. I would like your opinions.