In his latest post Chad Minick shares some thoughts as to why he thinks PHP frameworks are obsolete and how, despite there still being a use for them, a lot of them are just trying to solve the same problems all over again.

Now before I start getting hate mail, let me explain that I still think there is a market for PHP frameworks. I think if you have a moderately low traffic site that’s going to live on shared hosting, and is basically a CRUD application on top of MySQL, disregard this article, it probably isn’t for you. However, I’ve seen so many projects start out with that scope. They either grow or the developer/client wants to add more fancy new features they are starting to see elsewhere on the web. Then I see all these PHP developers hacking things that the PHP stack really isn’t meant to do.

He takes some of the core features of several of the popular frameworks out there and breaks them out into a list of technologies that do that work themselves (such as "Web Server", "Dependency Management", "Caching" and "Messaging"). He points to a Java/Scala framework, Play as an example of having several of these technologies built-in where you don't have to have a whole other set of skills to use them effectively. It's an interesting idea but seems a little NIH to me.

In this recent post to the Nodeable Blog, they suggest that the days of the typical LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) are numbered because of what many of the cloud services have to offer.

For the past 10 years, the LAMP stack has laid waste to proprietary software stacks. Yes, Microsoft has held onto gargantuan profits, but LAMP has become the foundation for leading web services, whether Google or Facebook or [Insert Big Web Brand Here]. LAMP is the future. Or was. That is, until cloud killed it, as Eucalyptus CEO (and former MySQL CEO) Marten Mickos posits in a great keynote from the Percona Live: MySQL Conference & Expo 2012.

In the keynote he pointed out that it's becoming less about the whole setup and more about combining technologies to get the results you need - less "stack" and more "linked technology" (and not always the same tech for every node). He pointed to the Amazon AWS service as a prime example of a platform that allows endless flexibility as to what software can be installed and how it can be used, all with a few clicks of a mouse.

As Paul Jones mentions, there's a sort of force in the PHP community that seems to be pushing back at the Smarty templating system and calling it unnecessary.

He points out Hasin Hayder's post on the subject. Hasin (ironically author of a Smarty book) has recently come to the conclusion that there "is no need to use an external template engine like smarty".

Some nice guys over there developed smarty and it saved life of a lot of developers (i mean developers). But that time is over. Seriously why the hell I need to learn a new templating language when a "echo" does the thing much better.

Judging by the responses to both Hasin's post and Paul's post it seems like quite a bit of the PHP community agrees (including Michael Kimsal, Harry Fuecks and Brian Lozier).

As Paul Jones mentions, there's a sort of force in the PHP community that seems to be pushing back at the Smarty templating system and calling it unnecessary.

He points out Hasin Hayder's post on the subject. Hasin (ironically author of a Smarty book) has recently come to the conclusion that there "is no need to use an external template engine like smarty".

Some nice guys over there developed smarty and it saved life of a lot of developers (i mean developers). But that time is over. Seriously why the hell I need to learn a new templating language when a "echo" does the thing much better.

Judging by the responses to both Hasin's post and Paul's post it seems like quite a bit of the PHP community agrees (including Michael Kimsal, Harry Fuecks and Brian Lozier).