In any programming language there are some pieces of code and functions you want to make once and reuse many times. When I first started programming I was creating every project from the beginning. I was writing the same functions over and over. I realized that I could reuse the same base just change the areas that needed to be different. The base is something that handles user management, access control, database communication, session management. Since I starting using this base, the projects have become much easier to maintain.

Recently I have been interviewing new developers for employment at our company. One developer asked me why we use our own framework and not just make plug ins for other more mature frameworks. My answer to this person was, we need a base that is as lightweight as possible, there are many frameworks that are great in handling many things but we like to keep things as small as possible and as low overhead as possible. He agreed that most frameworks are bloated and would need to be chopped up to get to what I wanted.

I am saying all this because maybe I am second guessing myself right now. I have not been on the look out for a framework in many months (1 year). Is there a new framework that is actively developed that may suit our needs? Is there finally a framework that is easy to learn, simple to use, intuitive to work with, easy to extend, quick to build and maintain applications?

Some frameworks I have been told to look at are :