MVC Frameworks for Websites??

[Webnerd]

I have been in the web industry for over 15 years. I have been doing work for a company that builds and deploys mostly "vanilla" websites with some CMS items and/or databsae interactivity. Nothing however, that I feel requires a complex framework such as RoR or Zend.

We also have different levels of developers on staff and turnaround time is essential in our company. So, it is important that the Junior and Entry Level developers can easily jump into any project that a Senior Level developer builds. My question is, why do some web developers keep trying to build "websites" (not applications) with RoR and/or Zend??? It is complete overkill and inhibits the other programmers from knowing what the hell is going on. You can't expect everyone to know everything and forcing someone into an unknown paradigm just causes resentment; especially when turnaround is essential.

I have a simple framework that is really just a small collection of tools that allows us to create and deploy websites in an efficient manner. However, one person in particular, is hell-bent on using Zend MVC for website building. In an environment where 90% of our time is spent coding HTML, we can't afford to be using complex frameworks.

My rant is really with egotistical programmers who have a feeling of self entitlement and they don't want to conform to efficient methods of getting work done.

Case and point, I have built out 3 websites with CMS tools on my little framework in the time he has been building one comparable site using Zend (despite the many times I have told him not to). In fact, he has lost total efficiency as he recently missed siginificant deliverable dates. I'm furious at this lack of teamwork, more-so, these stupid frameworks and MVC platforms that are being completely misused by developers who buy-in to them for things as simple as standard websites.

[NogDog]

Certainly one has to choose the right tool for each situation. There is no need for a chainsaw to prune your rose bush, and you would not want to chop down a tree with a pair of pruning shears. On the other hand, pretty much any MVC framework is going to have a learning curve to be conquered before you can start achieving efficiency with it (and Zend may have one of the steeper curves).

Whether or not any MVC framework is the right tool for the type of job you're talking about is something I cannot answer right now with the limited information at hand, though from your side of the argument it certainly sounds like an unnecessary overhead. However, I can tell you that I used the CodeIgniter framework for my little www.10kwebpages.com site and it worked quite well for me, taking only a few days of part-time work to get it up and running; though that was after having spent many hours of free time learning about CI and playing around with it, perusing its forums, etc.

So I think your major pain here is a teamwork issue and perhaps a poor judgment issue on this other person's part (assuming your analysis is correct). However, I would not throw MVC or other frameworks out completely as being of no use -- it all depends on what the particular need is and your skills with the tools in question.

[Webnerd]

Agree, teamwork is the issue. CodeIgniter is an exception in my book as I liked it's rather straight-forward approach. I think the biggest issue is people who are learning frameworks that are applying them to the completey wrong projects; and there are many.