On application design
Posted: Thu Aug 22, 2002 8:23 am
This is basically a rambling post, 'cuz I'm bored 
After being on this site for about a week, I'm starting to see some trends.
People brand new to PHP, tend to ask questions like "I need a page that does foo" or "Can PHP do bar?" where bar is oftened defined in terms of some page display.
The next group of people are often asking the questions like "How do I do X, Y,or Z better" with the tasks being some small snippet of the program.
As some people have said PHP's ease of use leads people to jump right in and not design their application first. However, I think there is an important observation that people miss in that statement. When either writing, or designing, a new web site, do you view it as a collection of pages (a web site) or a collection of data, functions, and display (an application). I would hazard to guess that most people fall into the first camp. If you sit down and design your pages ahead of time, carefully planning which pages lead where, etc, you'll likely feel are warm inside that you've done your good deed and designed before code. Yet, you soon get stuck in the same morass as before and start to think that all this design business is bogus.
I'd argue that in order to "elevate" your coding to the next level its useful, no required, to stop thinking page-centric and starting thinking of your project as an application.
I'm thinking of fleshing this idea out into an article of some kind, does anyone have any opinions
After being on this site for about a week, I'm starting to see some trends.
People brand new to PHP, tend to ask questions like "I need a page that does foo" or "Can PHP do bar?" where bar is oftened defined in terms of some page display.
The next group of people are often asking the questions like "How do I do X, Y,or Z better" with the tasks being some small snippet of the program.
As some people have said PHP's ease of use leads people to jump right in and not design their application first. However, I think there is an important observation that people miss in that statement. When either writing, or designing, a new web site, do you view it as a collection of pages (a web site) or a collection of data, functions, and display (an application). I would hazard to guess that most people fall into the first camp. If you sit down and design your pages ahead of time, carefully planning which pages lead where, etc, you'll likely feel are warm inside that you've done your good deed and designed before code. Yet, you soon get stuck in the same morass as before and start to think that all this design business is bogus.
I'd argue that in order to "elevate" your coding to the next level its useful, no required, to stop thinking page-centric and starting thinking of your project as an application.
I'm thinking of fleshing this idea out into an article of some kind, does anyone have any opinions