PROLOGUE

Welcome to the first installment of Captain’s Log(), the “techie blog” where you get to read about what the web developers & programmers here at D4 are working on and thinking about. I’m Jeremy (a.k.a. “The Captain”), and I’ll be your resident techie for this series of technical blogs.

Let’s get right into it, shall we?

INTRODUCTION TO FRAMEWORKS

Frameworks.

It seems like all the web programming languages these days have a framework: Ruby has Ruby on Rails. PHP has Cake, Symfony, CodeIgniter and Zend Framework. ASP has ASP.NET. Flash has the ActionScript Foundry. Java has Spring and JSF. Javascript has jQuery, Dojo, YUI and a few others. Even Python has a framework!!!

But what is a framework and why are they so popular?

DEFINITION OF A FRAMEWORK AND ITS BENEFITS

According to Wikipedia, a framework is “an abstraction in which common code providing generic functionality can be selectively overridden or specialized by user code providing specific functionality.”

In other words, frameworks are foundations of code upon which we build web applications and websites. They’re usually open-source, which means that they’ve been rigorously tested by thousands of developers from all over the world; and in many cases, they have huge corporations behind them, which means that they’ve been written by some of the industry’s leading web developers.

So in a nutshell, frameworks allow developers to avoid having to re-invent the wheel for each web application they develop, which is great - not only for big development teams, but also for small development teams who find themselves in the position of being flooded with work.

Which, fortunately, is the position we’re currently in, here at D4.

WHAT’S A CAPTAIN TO DO?

When I took the role of Senior Web Developer back in December, I quickly realized that things were changing at D4. Previously, the majority of our projects were exclusively for graphic design or print design, with the occasional website here and there. But today, it seems that most of our projects include some form of web development - whether it’s a website, e-commerce website, content management system, image gallery, etc.

Those kinds of projects usually require a large team of developers, but since the development team at D4 is quite small, we needed to come up with a way to get these projects out the door - and more importantly - a way to keep the quality of web development at the same high level as the quality of D4 design quality.

Definitely not an easy task!

INTRODUCING THE D4 FRAMEWORK

We’re still getting a high volume of projects in these days, which is somewhat surprising given the current economical climate, but not really that surprising because D4 is one of the best design agencies in the country.

In order to deliver these projects on time, we’ve decided to extend two of the best web development frameworks out there. The PHP side of the “D4 Framework” is built on top of Zend Framework and the JavaScript/CSS side is built on top of YUI.

By leveraging the benefits of Zend Framework and YUI and extending them to suit our own needs, we’re able to develop enterprise-level websites and applications in a fraction of the time it would take to build them entirely from scratch. Shorter development times mean that we can quote shorter timescales to our clients, which means we can offer the same high-quality solutions at more competitive rates.

And in the current economic climate, that makes for some truly satisfied clients.

CONCLUSION

I hope you’ve enjoyed the first installment of the Capatin’s Log(). Next week, I’ll be spilling the beans on a very exciting project we’re currently working on, so be sure to keep checking back.