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When Timani Tunduwani posted a message in the PRADO forums say that he had just made the switch from CakePHP to PRADO and had create prodezine.com my interest peeked and just had to find out more.
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Tell us a little about yourself?

I am a 24 year old programmer from Seattle. I am a freelancer at heart, UNIX/Linux, PHP, Python, but i currently have a fairly large, long-term project underway for a airfare consolidator. Basically worked as a network analyst for 3 years, then switched to web programming, had about two years of .net experience and then decided to make the switch early PHP4 and haven’t looked back since.

What were you using CakePHP for?

I am currently one of the lead programmers at Justfares.com and they are planning a major overhaul of their site. It was previously ASP.net and we switched to PHP5 rather rapidly, and as a team soon realized that we needed a standardized, scalable, mature, framework to manage and streamline development. CakePHP had rapid framework growth and development, good community support, and detailed framework documentation. Our main application is going to be a fairly comprehensive airfare engine that needs to get to its maximum potential, while working at an efficient rate.

What made you start looking around for another framework?

In the end we needed a framework that was flexible, powerful, versatile, and scalable so the company could grow and be efficient in a team setting. A new project arose spanning two large organizations with intricate data models, and they had said that the data management and management of business objects was becoming extremely complicated and was now a major issue to coordinate and manage effectively. CakePHP did not really address any of these issues directly so it was time for a new solution. PRADO.

Why did you settle on PRADO over other frameworks?

There are a number of reasons but primarily was the SQLMap Data Mapper. The ability to deal with the complex business logic that had arisen was pivotal. There was an extra but minor overhead, but a small price to pay and easily rectifiable through optimizing and using accelerators. Once we discovered the Data Mapper, more discoveries arose about the benefits of PRADO such as : the component structure, controls, strong event driven programming, team integration ability, power and simplicity to name but a few.

In detail how do PRADO and CakePHP compare?

The “average programmer” can grasp the concepts of PRADO fairly rapidly and the ease of configuration allows for ideal use in team situations. CakePHP has a steep learning curve and unless you have had some RoR it is not really ideal for adding to a team and productive time is wasted on training and understanding. A drawback not really found in PRADO, we have added programmers and with simple instruction they are able and easy to integrate into team environments without wasting too much time.

PRADO is good for all! Often working with designers can be a project within itself. They are focused on aesthetics and as a developer we prefer function. In PRADO a designer can complete his tasks without needing a great detailed understanding of the framework’s architecture. PRADO takes hold of certain tasks which can be done simply using controls(GridView, Repeater…..) vs CakePHP without having to do iterations through tables, rows, columns etc.

What do you miss from CakePHP?

PRADO’s Community is strong but CakePHP’s is stronger. Good support as well as rapidly growing community, and easily accessible applications with good documentation and snippets. It would be great if the IRC channel #prado was stronger, we can enhance the PRADO wiki, with a bit of effort from everyone to compete with the Bakery, and CakeForge which are well done. But most importantly promote the framework, and participate and promote PRADO HARD!!!!

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Wow! I know that I personally feel that Tim has really been able to find that sweet spot that PRADO fills for big team development something I’ve been pushing myself.

I hope you enjoy this interview look out for more PRADO verse other PHP frameworks posts coming soon!

A music contest site based on PRADO 3 was posted in the forums looking very cool and bristling with multi media features. I just had to find out more. So I sent a message to Dario Rigolin from Italy, asking if he would share with me and the readers of PRADO Watch his experience.

Tell me a little about yourself?

I’m a PHP adopter since PHP3. I worked many years in IT industries doing huge integration projects around Europe for the largest telecom companies and financial institutions. I worked mainly in Java and C/C++ during my travels.

Tell me a little about ePortal Technologies?

In 2003 I decided to startup my company, ePortal Technologies with my dear friend (a librarian) to build innovative applications for libraries. We released our first application “Clavis” to handle large library consortia. But the design of that wasn’t good enough to jump into Web 2.0. Then one and a half years ago we decided to start a complete redesign based on PRADO. We are a young and fast growing company here in Italy. We have three large library consortia: Verona, Milan and Gorizia. We have more than 200 libraries using our software daily.

Tell me where PRADO fits into ePortal Technologies’ business?

We were already using PRADO 2.x but for ClavisNG we decided to use PRADO3 at a very early stage. We are now close to releasing our first beta and we are very happy about our choice. We built components we released to the PRADO community and also test the snapshot to report any issues daily. In our applications we use all features of PRADO. We also are investing time and resources to make a better PRADO Portal. The only issue we have with PRADO is the decrease in speed due to “large framework” overhead and large use of OO in any aspect of the framework. We use PHP accelerators to speed up execution and profiling to fine tune code and are working to put in place a series of lightweight components for data grids and lists. We hope the PRADO extension will help speedup the code. In any case, the flexibility in our development process and the ability to adapt and extend the GUI to the end user is fantastic and this is the most valuable asset. At the moment any web applications and dynamic websites we build are PRADO based.

In what way did PRADO help you the most when developing foxcoverplay.com?

FoxCoverPlay had requirements to be not only a simple WebSite for a Music Contest but to become a portal with many new features designed to make a community: blogs, voting, advertising, eCommerce and so on. The customer was in a position to say: “I would like to test if this idea is good. I don’t have tons of Euros to invest but if it’s successful then we will attract investors and we will grow.” At this point, we decided to build a website with “flexibility in mind” and for us:

IF develop(WEBAPP) THEN PRADO

. And this was a good move. After a few weeks the customer asked for “multilanguage” everywhere, localization in PRADO is easy. Then we discussed about integrating personal areas for artistis, news/blog for site managers and so on. We had in the past really bad experiences customizing existing CMS or eCommerce in PHP. Most of them are “single man” projects, and you need to “enter into the mind” of the developer to be able to customize it. We failed in the past. Spending one month to understand how to do something simple like a chart read from a database or customizing a layout is really bad, etc. In one month a PRADO developer is able to put in place the usual 5 things a customer is asking. And then we have a framework we can adapt to future needs. This is really really really true when your website layout is coming from a Web Designer you never knew or you’ve never worked with and also he knows only PhotoShop and you receive a PSD… You need full control everywhere… And the PRADO component architecture helps a lot to reuse a visual part of the page. Is like playing with LEGO!

Was there any area that you felt PRADO got in your way or slowed you down?

No.

Did you create any cool components while developing the site?

Not really. UI was really simple and we simply created composite components.

What was the most challenging part of creating the site and how did PRADO fit into it?

The most challenging was making a “nonweb” customer to understand what to do with a Web Site from a technical point of view.

What would you have done differently if you were to do it all again?

CMS feature like uploading documents. At the moment is a WebDav based access. Not a PRADO upload via form.

What is your favorite thing about PRADO?

How easy it is using Active Components.

What is your least favorite thing about PRADO?

Too many event phases (11 or 13 I don’t remember). “init”, “load”, “preRender”, etc. 99% of the time we needed “init” and “load” only. When you have pages with lots of components every event dispatching to simply do nothing can be costly. I was thinking to have a “PradoLight” with less event dispatching.

If the PRADO fairy gave you one wish what component or feature would you wish for?

PRADO extension!

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I want to thank Dario Rigolin for giving us his time to share his knowledge with the community and hope to see more good stuff from him in the future.

If you enjoyed this interview and would like to see more please comment.