On the Web Builder Zone today Giorgio Sironi has posed a question for all PHP developers out there - is it possible to (effectively) use PHP without a framework these days?

In the same days [of the PHP Barcelona Conference], I attended Matteo Vaccari's talk at Webtech 2010. It was in Italian, but the translation would sound like Framework-free web programming. The context was the Java platform, where frameworks are even more invasive than in PHP. In that talk, I learned some interesting points which are often overlooked while considering frameworks adoption, delighted by the hope of writing less code.

Three of the points mentioned were the learning curve (and eventual lock-in) of using a framework, upgrading/version management and the errors/bugs/missing features that come with using another group's code. Giorgio talks about using external libraries from frameworks (like the Zend Framework) by including them and that frameworks are generally "catch all" tools that you only may want these certain parts of to be effective.