You rolled your own framework? Really?

One of the questions I get from pretty much every new developer that we hire is “Why did you write your own framework?  Why don’t you just use X?”, where X is the whatever PHP framework is currently flavour of the month.

One of the most interesting things about that question is watching how it changes over time.  “Why don’t you use CodeIgnitor?” became “Why don’t use ZendFramework?” became “Why don’t you use Symfony?”.

However, the answer is always the same.  Because that framework didn’t exist.

As you can see from the table, below, the Maldaba Application Framework (MAF) is older than all the major PHP frameworks in use today. 2006 seems to have been the year when the PHP community realised a need for frameworks in order to produce scalable, reusable and dependable applications, and we were ahead of the curve! The first project using MAF went live in January 2006, and the framework has been in constant development ever since.

* These popular CMSs are not strictly frameworks, but are included for comparison.