In this post over in the /r/PHP community of Reddit.com, there's a question about frameworks. The original poster wonders about the purpose of a framework and if they're a requirement to build any kind of application that's "worthwhile".

I read posts here from time to time, and Laravel and Symphony are mentioned a lot here, and I always get the impression that it is a must to use a framework, to build something worthwhile. A little background on myself is that I've always approached development in a cowboy coding style where I just code. I've made a system where I use the basic mysqli object in PHP for database interaction, and I use Smarty templating system to output the html/css/js. I build my own classes based on what the customer is asking for, and then obviously I make the controller pages calling the classes I made - manipulate the data and output to smarty. What would Symphony help me with - that would be hard to accomplish regularly?

Plenty of answers and opinions are shared in the comments of the post, ranging from:

• Encouragement for Symfony2 and the development speed it accommodates
• Building a project without a framework
• The benefits and downfalls of using MVC and other design patterns you may not fully understand
• A definition of what a "framework" means outside of the world of MVC

There's also a consensus among several of the posts that one of the major benefits of a framework is to provide an overall decrease in the time to market with the handy features and things it provides out of the box. What do you think? Head over and post some thoughts of your own about frameworks and where they fit in your development.