Why do I need to use a popular framework?

Question 1

I've been a PHP developer for many years now, with many tools under my belt; tools that I've either developed myself, or free-to-use solutions that I have learned to trust.

I looked into CodeIgniter recently, and discovered that they have many classes and helper routines to aid with development, yet saw nothing in the examples that I couldn't do just as easily with my own tools. Simple things like DB abstractions, Email helpers, etc. There was some interesting code relating to routes - mapping urls to the right controllers; but even that's not particularly difficult to code yourself if you've ever written an MVC style web app with pretty urls.

Even after looking through some of the other popular frameworks, I still see nothing that would be that much of a time-saver. Even looking at the forums, I see people struggling to get the tools to work for them. I do understand how they would be more useful for junior developers, since full system design skills take a while to understand and appreciate fully.

Yet, I'm often told that I should use an off-the-shelf framework to produce my solutions, but I still remain unconvinced. What's the real benefit to someone like myself? Am I just being elitist, or is this a common opinion?

Edit: Looking at some of the answers here, should I perhaps consider packaging up my toolset as its very own framework, writing some documentation and posting tutorials? If I'm hesitant to take on other's frameworks, would opening it up and getting more eyes on it help to improve my own skills/tools?

Question 2

Frameworks have several advantages:

You don't have to write everything. In your case, this is less of a help because you have your own framework which you have accumulated over the years.
Frameworks provide standardized and tested ways of doing things. The more users there are of a given framework, the more edge cases that have been encountered and coded for. Your own code may, or may not, be battle hardened in the same way.
Others can be recruited onto a project with a standard framework and have access to the documentation, examples and experience with that framework. Your own snippets may or may not be fully documented or have examples of use... but isn't much chance that others are comfortable with them initially.

EDIT:

With regards to your idea of packaging up your own framework, the benefit of cleaning it up for public consumption can be larger than the benefit of getting others to use it.

The reason is simple: you will have to re-evaluate your assumptions about each component, how they fit together and how clear each piece is to understand. Once you publish your framework, your success will be strongly dependent on how easy it is to get up and running with.

Big wins with little effort are essential for adoption (those wins will encourage people to delve further into the framework). Ruby on Rails in an example of a framework that gives such big wins with little effort, and then has hidden layers of features that would have overwhelmed someone just getting started. (The question of the quality of RoR apps is not the point, the point is about adoption speed).

After people adopt a framework, it is about the ease of continued use. Little details like consistent parameter use patterns make all the difference here. If one class has many parameters on every method, while another has setters that are expected to be called before invoking methods, you will lose users because they can't get a "feel" for what is expected in a given case without resorting to the documents.

If both ease-of-adoption and ease-of-living-with issues are addressed properly, you only have to get lucky for people to adopt your framework. If those issues are not addressed properly, even an initial interest in the framework will wane quickly. The reason is that there are many frameworks: you will need to stand out to gain the advantages of having others using your kit (as they rightfully are as wary of your framework as you are of others).

Question 3

You should always continue respecting the basic principles of security :

don't trust the user
never trust the user

Which kinda means :

filter / validate everything that comes to your application
escape any output.

Using a framework doesn't change much about that, except that :

Output to the database often es some layer of the framework, which should deal with escaping
Frameworks often provide filtering / validation solutions ; use them ;-)
Frameworks often have some guidelines ; read them.

As a sidenote : you said this :

there is a lot-of code and design that you relay on but that you didn't code or design

Considering you are using a well-known framework that lots of people use, this code has probably been more tested/reviewed than any code you could write ;-)

That's an advantage of open-source, actually : you are not the only one responsible for the code, and lots of eyes have seen it -- which means lots of hands have enhanced it.

Question 4

That’s simply the way it is. In Rust a trait must be in scope for you to be able to call its methods.

As for why, the possibility of collisions is the reason why. All the formatting traits in std::fmt (Display, Debug, LowerHex, &c.) have the same method signature for fmt. For example; what would object.fmt(&mut writer, &mut formatter) do, for example? Rust’s answer is “you must explicitly indicate by having the trait in scope where the method is.”

Note also how the error message says that “no method named `m` found for type `T` in the current scope”.

Note that you don't have to import it if you want to use the trait method as a function instead of a method:

extern crate rustc_serialize;

use rustc_serialize::base64;

fn main() {
    let auth = format!("{}:{}", "user", "password");
    let auth_b64 = rustc_serialize::base64::ToBase64::to_base64(auth.as_bytes(), base64::MIME);
    //             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
    println!("Authorization string: {}", auth_b64);
}

Question 5

Helpers are the classes that help something already there for example there can be a helper for:

array
string
url
etc

A library is something that can be any solution; it could be created for the first time by you and no one else has created.

Because you are dealing with a string (something already there), you should put it in a helper class, or modify the string helper class of the framework (if there is one). However, this is a convention or standard but you can create a library for it too if you are creating something really cool for string handling with quite some functions.

Question 6

It's not strictly needed for the query, it's true. It exists for several reasons:

As a constraint on the table to stop you inserting something that doesn't point to anything;
As a clue for the optimizer; and
For historical reasons where is was more needed.

(1) is probably the important one of the three. This is called referential integrity. It means that if there is a value in a foreign key there will be a corresponding record with that value as a primary key in the parent table.

That being said, not all databases support referential integrity (eg MySQL/MyISAM tables) and those that do don't necessarily enforce it (for performance reasons).

Why do I need to use a popular framework?

Answers

php,frameworks