[thelist] PHP Framework? API? Not Sure

[david.landy at somerfield.co.uk]

Burhan Khalid wrote:
>   It just occurred to me while working on the third site in as many 
>weeks, that most of my code is becoming repetitive...

Agreed. Most front-ends I've worked on have a maintenance page for each
table to allow add/edit/del/undel/sort/find/filter, and a users section to
define users, groups and access rights.

>   So I'm now looking for an API or some framework that I can use to 
>reduce these repetitive tasks.  Anyone have any recommendations?  

Not for any commercial products -- I rolled my own. After building a working
prototype for a single table, I wrote a generator to write the remaining jsp
pages and supporting java classes, to to make a 3-Tier-MVC application.
Rather nifty, I thought! It's now relatively easy to add new tables and
reports (based on a query) -- just make the table/query and then hit the
button. 

Hand-coded changes to the generated code are preserved as the generator
senses any changed pages and leaves them alone -- just cut and paste newly
generated code into touched-up pages to update them. My experience is that
this is usually a small fraction of the app so it's not a big hassle.

Perhaps I'm reinventing the wheel but at least I know what it's doing and if
there are any bugs it's easy (ok, easier!) to track them down. And the big
benefit is that next time I build a jsp site, the prototype will be up in a
matter of hours.

>I'm 
>evaluating blueshoes[1] right now, and am also looking into Typo3[2] 
>(which seems to have a steep learning curve), and would welcome any 
>suggestions or comments.

Would love to hear how you got on.

David.

 
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