So I’ve reached a point where I know what the application I will write needs to do. The next logical step is to design that application. However, before I do a design, I need to have a “big picture” idea of the software architecture and I need to know what third party code libraries I can use.

As I noted, choosing a language is choosing a platform:

This was something I was planning to move on to talk about in more detail later. When you pick a language, you do need to look around at the choices of libraries available to you. PHP is lucky. It’s mature. There are a lot of libraries out there.

But, you must be very careful when confronted by such choice. Take a look at the options available for templating. Pear (a major source of libraries) have several implementations. There’s Smarty, and numerous other “just templating” libraries. The new Zend Framework also has a templating implementation.

I need to make a very careful set of choices when choosing what libraries to build on, if you choose the wrong items, and get them fundamentally embedded into your application, at a later date you have a much bigger job to replace them. Possibly a fundamental re-write.

Now, I’m wanting to make use of standard design patterns to make sure my application architecture is maintainable, controllable, extendible and scalable. So I’m going to be following standard Object Oriented software design using standard design patterns. I’m going to utilise Model View Controller (MVC, or in Microsoft Land Model View Presenter), Database Abstraction Layers, Singleton Patterns and other things.

AS noted, PHP is very mature, there are a lot of choices. Some of those choices are more mature than others. Some are big and bloated, some a trim and limited. It’s essential I make the right choices.

I’m going to spend the next few articles examining database abstraction libraries and templating engines. Then move on to look at design pattern libraries to support an MVC implementation. But, first I need a good set of criteria to compare them on. I need to look at the following:

• Performance
• API details (will it do what I want flexibly enough, will it lend itself to integrating with other libraries and my own code?)
• Documentation (will I be able to figure out how to use it?)
• Is the project alive and moving or is it dead?

Critical to me most of all is performance, I don’t want the PHP engine to have to process thousands of kb of useless code that will never be called by my code, just to get some trivial feature. So I need to find a way to asses this. The first stop on this route is to get some profiling tools installed into my development environment, so that’s what I’ll do next.

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This is version 1 of this entry and was posted 2 years, 9 months ago on Saturday, June 16th, 2007 at 4:50 pm and is filed under Development, Opinion, PHP, Programming Tools. It's popularity ranking is Popularity: 24% [?]. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. This is the first version of this post.