Dr. StrangeFramework or how I learned to stop worrying and love the layers

Part 4.5 – the PHP Framework
Before moving on to the data layer, I first need to discuss the PHP Framework. I’ve moved from no-frameworks to frameworks for everything – WHY? Simple, it forces you to code to specific standards making the code cleaner and more maintainable. Frameworks also reduce the amount of code that has to be done – the less coding the fewer bugs. The first real framework I’ve used since web coding was CodeIgniter (http://codeigniter.com/) – about a year ago I decided to try a MVC framework (Model/View/Control) and did enough research to determine that CodeIgniter was stable enough and flexible enough for me…so far I’ve been very impressed with it and the associated community (a very important thing to look for – without support the best framework is useless). SO, to move on with the story, without thinking twice I used CodeIgniter for the PHP framework, the one dissatisfaction I had was the data model layer, I wanted something more than creating SQL code and returning array bound data…I wanted ORM (Object Relational Mapping) which I was hoping to use to reduce the amount of manipulation to set up the arrays to feed to the json encoder. It didn’t take long to find DataMapper (http://stensi.com/datamapper/) – an add on for CodeIgniter providing the ORM layer I was looking for. ..next step – ORM