Sorry for the lack of content on this site. I have been spending a lot of time trying to organizes and prioritize my life in general. These past weeks I have been trying to work on many new web projects of my own, some which I will announce on the Nextrix website once they are closer to a public release.

One of these projects is focused entirely on helping me organize and prioritize my freelancer contract work that I do on the side. Currently I handle all my invoices and receipts that I send out to clients either through Microsoft Office or Google Docs (Gears included). I realized that overtime they will start piling up in a folder and it will become hard to manage and search through them all. I decided that I need a new method of creating, and storing these important documents. I looked at what current applications are available out there to purchase, but most of them have too many features that I currently do not need at the present time. These applications just cost too much for what I am looking for at the moment. I want to have the creative freedom to add new features to an application when I need them.

I decided that if I want to get specific features from this tool, the best action would be to develop my own application, and why not use it as another learning experience. I have spent most of my life taking on new and exciting projects, learning my life's worth from them. This is just another one to expand my mind on and experience from.

My primary focus on developing this application will be to use the PHP scripting language as it still is a very common language used over the web. I was just unsure how I would develop with it. Sure I could code it from scratch, but the development time to push out a project like that for just for one man alone would not meet the time schedule I am actually looking to meet. So I decided to check out some of these PHP frameworks. I have dealt with frameworks in general before when working at previous companies, but it has been a while since I checked out how many of them were doing. So I dived back into the seat, and scoured the web for them.

In the end of reviewing, coding, and reading the documentation of many frameworks, I came to the conclusion that a lot of them are over bloated with too many features. Some which are done just because the person or team developing the framework likes to use certain method more than the general public. Most of them are really slowing down the performance of the applications and even stressing out the servers they are running on. The turnover to produce these websites might be faster, but I believe that any true framework's intention should be directly focused on providing a standards compliance code structure, with faster turnover features and abilities, while still keeping the framework very minimal. The only framework that really interested me in the end was the CodeIgnitor framework as it focuses more on the bare bones approach of just implementing the MVC architectural pattern.

I am still unsure if this is the path to take for development of this project. Through these weeks I also took a look at the Ruby on Rails (RoR) framework that was created for the Ruby language. It seems to be catching a lot of programmers' attention, and I reviewed a PHP framework that seemed to be an exact copy of this framework, called Akelos. The PHP framework looks to implement many cool features in the RoR framework, but in my opinion it's much better to just stick with RoR as it probably performs much better. I have no clue why someone would try to copy the exact same methods and procedures of coding in Ruby and implement them over to another language. This is why you don't see any PHP.NET frameworks appearing around the bend... I can't turn a blind eye against Akelos as it has many features like the Installer and Localization engine which are features I've been waiting for in a PHP framework/library for a long time!

Anyways so this week I have to decide on weather to go the CodeIgnitor approach, or jump into this Ruby language and spend the time learning it, then moving to learning RoR. I might actually try to do both, if I get the time.