I am currently planning to design & develop a web application which manages information of students transported from and to their home, to & from their schools, respectively, using various available transport methods/services. The main entities of the database are schools, students and ways of transport (taxi, bus, e.t.c.), with their relationships defined per school (nursery, primary, secondary, college) & at least on an annual basis. Major will be and the role of users-school managers who will enter & edit DB data, as well as the need to apply constraints to roles and users that will enter and modify data in DB tables.
So my question asking for help is: which of the current-state, open source, freely available web frameworks (e.g. Laravel, Symfony, Angular, Node, React, et.c.), seem(s) to be the best choice (one or combination of them), so as to accelerate & simplify my work, achieving the optimum result?
No tool can accelerate & simplify anything by itself, with no effort on your part. The situation is quite the opposite: the better the tool, the more it accelerates the process, the longer time it takes to learn. While taken from the wrong end, it will rather spoil the effort.
So, frankly, there is no magic wand yet, that will do all the job for you.
Were your premises like “will make my knowledge up to date” or “will help me to produce the state-of-art application”, I would have suggested Laravel. But for the premises given, I am afraid there is no solution.
Dear colshrapnel, thank you for answering.
I suppose I did not make clear enough what I really meant: I am not looking for any magic wand that will do all the job for me, as you mistakenly conceived. Anyway, obviously I was misunderstood, everything is OK, no bad news.
In fact, I expect a bit more practical & experience-driven advise & information by developers who have ideally designed/developed a similar project &, at least, having understood the general requirements such web application would have. I would appreciate any such comment and reply, so as to avoid platforms & frameworks that, although popular & widely suggested/used, may not fit my project needs.
I frankly agree with you that time & effort are inevitably longer & bigger in order to learn to use top-level frameworks the right way. As for Laravel, currently remains a choice.
There are too many frameworks of PHP are available in market, but personally I suggest you YII framework. I think this framework is more simple and secure then other frameworks. As per your requirement this framework is perfect and can fulfill it very well.
Without knowing any more of the details, I guess the best answer would have to be.
Whatever framework you already have experience in using so you won’t need to learn how to use another. Then bang it into shape with plugins and hacks to do whatever it doesn’t already do “out of the box”, efficiency be damned.
There is no mention of your programming experience which would make an enormous difference to completing the task on schedule. Unless this is a hobby project with no time limits?
I would be tempted to ask the question on each of the Frameworks and judge from the responses if you would like to join the relevant community.
Dear chetuquery, thank you for your reply with YII proposal & brief info.
Dear ahundiak, Mittineague & John_Betong, thank you for your replies. Regarding your comments about project details & my experience, although with programming & web development experience since 2003 (HTML, CSS, Javascript, XML, ASP & MS SQL Server, PHP & MySQL), until recently, I’ve never used any of the available frameworks (except CodeIgniter to implement a CRUD-based web app). I am mostly used to writing scratch-code, even when had to deal with requirements such as multi-user & multi-role systems, forms & reports based on joined SQL queries on DB tables with m-to-n relationships, et.c…
So, now that project challenge has come (deadline is not forever), I’ve been spenting time reading about various frameworks, template engines, MVC & such. What made me write a post & start a topic has been my (hidden) ambition/hope that someone could have designed/developed a similar application, which contains mostly kind-of-backend operations (multi-user login, data entry & editing to spreadsheet-like forms, et.c.).
So, my true intention is NOT TO AVOID spending time reading & practicing fresh new web development knowledge, but to be (relatively) sure about the tools I’m going to use to implement the application (& hopefully, succeed at reducing my scratch-coding time). Besides, as famous greek philosopher Aristoteles had said 2400 years ago, “no virtue & good is obtained or achieved without struggle”.
Well, I would not dare to imply so - I am not looking for “OOTB”, tailor-made framework & software solutions. I need help to decide which open source/free framework seems (currently) to be the most appropriate set of tools to work with in order to have the project ready, let’s say next 4-5 months.
But, if, by your experience, you are certain that, e.g. popular framework A is “better” compared to another popular framework B, at creating, customising & managing spreadsheet-like PHP forms interacting with a MySQL DB, as well at setting & managing users/roles permissions & safely implementing further views & actions/controllers, it would be really helpful for me to know, so as to certainly not prefer B, until A, or another framework stands out as the best for my project, according to your & other forum users’ experience & knowledge.
A bit more specific description of the project:
At a regional level & per year, schools managers (connect to) enter residence data about students of their schools who are allowed/using a means of transport to daily transfer from home to school and reversely. Then, employees/supervisors of a regional public organization use data entered, so as to filter, check, group & further organize them, in order to finally conclude to the optimum list of routes, that specific transport providers will be selected to serve.
Dormilich, thanks for replying, it’s becoming clearer to me that the best way to start is to just choose one of the PHP frameworks available, that seemingly fits mainly my skills & preferences rather than my project’s general requirements.