Lee Blue has posted his next article in a series covering some of the real costs and considerations around using PHP for your applications. In this latest post he talks about frameworks and what kind of effect they could have on the overall profitability of your business.

Last week we talked about application shelf life an aspect of PHP development that often goes overlooked. This week let's talk about how the web development framework you use contributes to the shelf life of your app and the profitability of your web application. [...] The main goal of all web frameworks is to improve the developer's ability to get ordinary things done so we can focus on the primary goals of what we're building.

He talks about how PHP was "made for the web" and why there are so many different kinds of frameworks out there (though most are generally MVC-ish). He talks about one of the standard arguments, learning curve vs efficiency, and how it compares to the "no framework framework" ideals. He then gets into some of the dark side of using frameworks, specifically how they can shorten the shelf life of an application and how difficult migration can sometimes be. He points out the irony of large frameworks: the bigger the app/framework, the harder it can be to migrate (and cost more). He encourages sticking with smaller, lighter frameworks instead and suggests coding standards, common packages and using custom libraries only where needed to create your application.