Why should I use RoR, or django, or cake ?

[mlk]

web applications all seem to use a popular framework, but I don't understand how these are tailored to meet specific demands (short of doing a blog-type site/photos/digg clone)

You might need to state the obvious, but what are the advantages of using a framework versus hard coding all your website ?

[evildrummer]

Very clean and fast code.

No longer do you have to wrote messy SQL queryies. If I want to find the details of a user with the username 'stuartloxton' I could just do:

//CakePHP example
$this->User->findByUsername('stuartloxton'); 

It allows you also to seperate all your code into MVC (Model View Controller) format.

It does a lot of mononetnous stuff for you:
Automatically fills in created and modified date fields in tables
Pluralises stuff
Can use multi-functional layouts (I specify a layout for HTML, AJAX, JSON, etc) it does the rest with the view and knows how to render the page.

[Pasquale]

use RoR because I am learning it and dont want to feel like an idiot for using it alone

[evildrummer]

Just experiment and find what your comfortable with. I normally use RoR or Cake depending on which server the app is going to be deployed on. If I don't have access to the server I stick to Cake as PHP is still supported on more servers but for my site I run RoR.

[blazes]

I like RoR the best, but haven't used django. I like RoR better, because I simply like ruby better than php. Plus the way ruby code is written, allows for uses development.

The RoR equivalent of EvilDrummer's code:

Users.find_by_username('stuartloxton'); 

[hl]

Am I the only one who feels more efficient without a framework?

[mlk]

^^ that's what I thought harish

my php skills are definitely not professional but I'd rather build an app from the ground up then try to understand and append to a skyscraper

i'll give them a go (they're all free, right ?)

[BS]

^Yup

[Jeff Wheeler]

• PHP is the worst language on the planet, so with some of the frameworks, I can avoid that and use Python or Ruby — good, clean languages. (Of course, this reason doesn’t apply to PHP frameworks.)
• They’re a helluva lot faster than anything I can write.
• They usually do some security stuff.
• ORMs, which make life livable
• Caching
• Clean URIs

Those are my reasons, at least.

[Templarian]

I agree with nokrev on the security part... most frameworks deal with the obvious things in PHP that are easy to overlook.

hl, I believe its just a thing of learning the frameworks although usually they are pretty easy to pick up and learn relatively fast.

I'm more a custom guy myself also, but I'm in the habit of reusing class over and over to take out the grunt work like most frameworks do. The guy I work with though is a framework nut (but hes also the type of person that runs linux on his work machine in vmware).

[Jeff Wheeler]

Actually, if it were convenient, I’d probably love to learn to write custom apps in Python or OCaml or something — it’s just pretty dang inconvenient to do that.

[evildrummer]

As said before they just make things faster, easier AND the code cleaner and more organise. And also as a lot of them now go with conventions it means other people who use that framework can understand things easily.