Last night I gave a talk about building websites with Knockout.JS, which I’ve been happily using for a long time. I demonstrated using Slim as an application framework, and RedBeanPHP as an ORM on the back-end. I’ve used Slim on a few projects in the past, but this was my first time playing with RedBeanPHP. I’m looking forward to learning more about this cool little ORM.
The main message of the talk was that choosing simple frameworks can mean writing and maintaining less code, and can help to overcome obstacles to adopting TDD.
At the same time, I’m a big fan of Angular, Symfony and Doctrine. For projects that can benefit from those more elaborate architectures they should be used. For smaller projects, or to make getting traction with TDD easier you should consider smaller frameworks like those touched on here.
If I were doing this talk again I would break it into three parts to that I could spend more time on each library, and on the unit testing. I was barely able to finish in an hour and a half, and I feel terrible for putting the group through such a long and code-heavy talk (again).
The slides are posted on slideshare, and the code is posted on github.
Vic Metcalfe 