Rasmus Lerdorf: Web 2.0’s John Wayne

You have to take your hat off to him: The no-framework PHP MVC framework – a walk through building a simple app with “raw” PHP and a lot of Javascript.

Some choice quotes (he’s very quotable);

So you want to build the next fancy Web 2.0 site? You’ll need some gear. Most likely in the form of a big complex MVC framework with plenty of layers that abstracts away your database, your HTML, your Javascript and in the end your application itself. If it is a really good framework it will provide a dozen things you’ll never need.

I like stuff I can understand in an instant. Both because it lets me be productive right away and because 6 months from now when I come back to fix something, again I will only need an instant to figure out what is going on.

Just make sure you avoid the temptation of creating a single monolithic controller. A web application by its very nature is a series of small discrete requests. If you send all of your requests through a single controller on a single machine you have just defeated this very important architecture. Discreteness gives you scalability and modularity.

Many frameworks may look very appealing at first glance because they seem to reduce web application development to a couple of trivial steps leading to some code generation and often automatic schema detection, but these same shortcuts are likely to be your bottlenecks as well since they achieve this simplicity by sacrifizing flexibility and performance. Nothing is going to build your application for you, no matter what it promises.

So how about Web 2.0 celebrity deathmatch? Rasmus vs. ?