Do not reinvent the wheel

Worse thing that you have done for development an application is reinventing the wheel. Initially when I thought of the idea of Listible - I have contacted several contractors and outsource companies to develop this list system. Many contractors told me that they will create their own code - from RSS feed handling, general database handling, to AJAX. I asked them, can they use any framework or any existing libraries? They said they will do better job then those existing frameworks.

I ditched the idea of getting contractor on this project (at least for now) and start this project on my own because they cannot meet our requirements. Or simply put, I do not agree with their mindset. I know that the more code that we bare on our side, it will be worse when we come to a time when performing maintenance and bug fixing.

Long story short, I finally chose symfony framework and its example as the base for Listible - Simply for three reasons. 1. I do not need to redo some basic Web2.0 supports, such as raw Ajax and RSS handling. 2. PHP is a very common language among web developers community and I can source developers easily. If there are features that the framework lacks, I can always contribute back to the framework upstream. 3. Symfony is an excellent framework and I trust symfony can and will be one of the leading frameworks on top of PHP.

Also, I am really interested and enlighted on how Fabien and the team use different ways to attract developer to use symfony - especially the level of the documentation compared to other frameworks. This is an off-topic for this post, so I will touch more on that later.