As I said, I enjoy the show and this is more an observation than a criticism. I seemed to have worked with a lot of developers who would rather write their own ORM rather than use something like NHibernate that I am a huge user of in my day job. If a framework is written well, then it should have the right amount of extensibility points for you to plug in your own part of variability.

Saying that, I have never coded in PHP so I have no idea what is on offer.

I blogged about something similar in the .NET OSS space where every week it seems a new mocking, IOC or test framework comes up. http://thesoftwaresimpleton.blogspot.com/2010/01/go-fubumvc-yourself.html

I do take your point about wanting to make things enjoyable.

Keep up the great work with the show.

I fully admit I have a full blown case of NIH, but it works for me so that probably won’t ever change. The way I see it the world needs people who like to start from scratch and build their own stuff just like it needs others who like to use that stuff to build their stuff. Granted, it’s usually less efficient to build a library if a high quality one is freely available, but there are often other considerations that play into it. Why did John Resig build jQuery? I mean prototype was mature, high quality and had pretty much become a standard. Why didn’t he just build on top of that or become a contributer? Or why didn’t he just throw in with Dojo? Why did the guys who built the Doctrine ORM not use Propel or Kahuna or whatever else was already available? I can’t answer those questions because they were probably very context specific or even personality specific. In the end, they probably did it because ultimately they just wanted to and as a result I think the world is a better place because there are now more choices and thus more knowledge. In terms of myself, I do what makes me productive and keeps me excited about what I’m doing and all I recommend to other coders is that they to the same, whatever path they take.

But I should also clarify a few things. I absolutely do not claim that my Javascript library is on par with jQuery and if it came across that way then I did a poor job expressing myself. My library is relatively small, but it does it’s job, it’s all I need and I know it very well. While it’s not something I’m trying to get other people to use, I’m certainly not going to stop using it on my own projects just because a lot of other people really like jQuery. To them I say use jQuery!;) In terms of jQuery Mobile, I don’t think I was dismissing it, I just wasn’t all that interested in it because I personally would probably just use Titanium to build native iPhone and Andorid apps, but that’s just me. I’m sure jQuery Mobile will be a great technology for developers of mobile web apps.

In terms of the PHP ORMs, I studied all the ones available in great detail and they all have problems that I couldn’t fix without a great amount of time, effort and pain. I even heavily researched Rails, Merb and Hibernate and read numerous academic papers on the subject. Our decision to write our own ORM has worked out great for us and I’m very glad we made that decision. The ORM is at the core of what AppIgnite is so if there’s one single wheel that was worth reinventing that was it.

Anyway, I’m glad you’ve been enjoying the show and I hope my explanation helps you to understand why I do things the way I do them. Also, I’m not recommending that other developers follow my path or do what I do. On the show I just try to be open and transparent about how I do things regardless of whether or not it goes against what’s currently deemed a best practice, accepted doctrine or politically correct. In the end, I just hope that my heretical ways won’t irritate or anger our listeners so much as serve to spark an interesting and entertaining discussion. And if not, well … at least I was honest. 😉

He even stated his javascript library is on par with JQuery which is written by a collection of the best minds in JavaScript.

Writing your own ORM also is not a great use of time when so many mature alternatives abound that have been stabilised by maturity and use.

In the latest show he totally dismissed talk of JQuery mobile to talk about his own stuff.

I once worked with somebody who tried to get me to use his ORM over NHibernate.

I declined.

Apart from that, I love the show :-).