Best PHP Framework for Mobile Web Apps
Posted: Sat Jan 30, 2010 10:53 pm
I've been pondering pushing into mobile web app creation with PHP (since I've been having trouble grasping Obj-C for building iPhone apps
) and while I've been able to create simple web apps using plain old HTML, CSS, and PHP there's just a certain something lacking. For one thing, I absolutely hate it when a supposed web app involves a screen refresh. In my mind, well built web apps should behave almost as well as the compiled apps that live on the device. They should be fast, sleek, and AJAXed.
The fast part brings me to my next point - while we can get away with running massive frameworks that take several seconds to render, trying to pull this off is a death knell for your web app (especially if its not an AJAX call). In my experience anything longer than five seconds is a deal-breaker. Worse, loading an entire javascript framework like jQuery or MooTools is probably not a wise choice - they're heavy frameworks and are expensive to process on limited-speed devices.
So I guess my question is: what would you consider to be the best framework for development in this situation? A few people have told me that we just shouldn't use a framework, period, but I find that over the top - is it time for a super lightweight PHP framework specifically geared for mobile web app design?
Thoughts?
The fast part brings me to my next point - while we can get away with running massive frameworks that take several seconds to render, trying to pull this off is a death knell for your web app (especially if its not an AJAX call). In my experience anything longer than five seconds is a deal-breaker. Worse, loading an entire javascript framework like jQuery or MooTools is probably not a wise choice - they're heavy frameworks and are expensive to process on limited-speed devices.
So I guess my question is: what would you consider to be the best framework for development in this situation? A few people have told me that we just shouldn't use a framework, period, but I find that over the top - is it time for a super lightweight PHP framework specifically geared for mobile web app design?
Thoughts?