>Anybody can recommend a framework ? I found openbiz is quite good.

I went through this exercise about 2 years ago. You need to have a really
good reason for a framework first. Most people will use a design pattern
for this reason. For some, a framework is just plain overkill. But for
others, its critical.

For example, we do all of our development using the MVC (Model View
Controller) design pattern because of the types of PHP applications we
develop. As a result, we went looking for a framework that follows that
pattern. Our goal is to truly separate the presentation layer from the
backend code, and MVC is great for that. After reviewing about a dozen
frameworks, we ended up using CodeIgniter for this (www.codeigniter.com)

What was attractive to us was the true seperation of the UI from the
application, which means CI PHP apps tend to work well with AJAX style
development, and also when you want to separate the database from the server
application.

Once this was established, we then had to find a way to make Firebird fit
into it. We chose to modify the EzSQL and EzResults class libraries
(following Alan's suggestion) for CodeIgniter. This works really well and
allows us to have multiple concurrent separate connections to FB from PHP if
I need to do complex transforms, etc.

The other thing that is attractive to us with CI is the search engine
friendly URL formats, and the community support. Community members are
continually submitting code for all to share. You'll find it hard to have a
need that isn't already supported in some way with CI submitted code, and
the nature of the framework forces you to document your code well which
keeps maintainability high.

So that's my story. We've done VERY BIG PHP apps with this (ie. PHP apps
with over 250 tables of FB storage) and we use the Smarty template engine
for everything also. Again, Smarty fits in well with CI once you tweak CI
to do the right things for you.

Hope this helps.

Myles

============================
Myles Wakeham
Director of Engineering
Tech Solutions USA, Inc.
Scottsdale, Arizona USA
www.techsol.org
Phone +1-480-451-7440

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