Contrary to what its name suggests, phpPeanuts is not simple or easy to learn. You need to be an experienced programmer, and preferably have experience with a more conventional framework with (ORM). But probably the most important of all is your mindset: you like to investigate and solve puzzles. If you primarily like create and build, phpPeanuts is probably not a good choice for you.
Conventional frameworks tend to offer a basic mechanism for handling and dispatching HTTP requests and a library of components that you can reuse to do a lot of dirty work. As an application developer you need to register handlers and take care of composition of pages and delegation to the components. They tend to let you work with the components as black boxes, just configuring them and delegating to them using a documented api. This keeps you shielded from their complicated internal working, but limits you to the behavior that you can obtain by configuration. In reaction to developer demands these components tend to be made more and more powerfull by adding more configuration options, making them larger and more complicated.
PhpPeanuts rather follows a whitebox aproach: its components are not meant to do everthing you may want from them. Usually they do not have a lot of confuguration options. Instead you can subclass them or use one of the pre-exiting default subclasses to overide any mehod you like. This offers you greater flexibility as you are completely free to program whatever you like in those overrides. It also keeps the framework itself relatively small and simple. But the downside is that you need to understand how the component works. You need to investigate, and oiften to reverse engineer the framework code, so that you know which methods to override on which classes and what your overriding code wil do in the context of the rest of te component.
This results in a steep learning curve that can only be overcome with proper preparation and a lot of investigation. If you see this learning as something that is holding you back in getting a job done, there are plenty of other frameworks that are easyer to learn. If you see it as an investment in knowlegde and you know by experience that knowledge is the most valuable asset of software developers, you are on the right track.Knowledge about flexible software design and sustainable productivity will only become more valuable as software development evolves.
But if you really have the mindset of an inverstigator, that's only rationalizition, you just like to learn and to puzzle for their own sake. Then phpPeanuts may be an interesting opportunity to conquer someting that is open to investigation but will not give in easily. Please proceed to the documentation section to see how to get started. |
