This question is mainly to get advice from those who have experience using a framework. Any thoughts are more than welcome.
We are a small dev team, and wonder whether we need a PHP framework in the first place? Lots of things to be found on the net, and quite a few opinions on it.
Not that I'm after a say detailed analysis of our needs and the usefulness of a framework for our particular case. More of a general opinion on what you could say are 'standards' in the industry.
So in short: we're an experimental dev team working on a open source project. It's experimental in the sense that's it's going to take quite a while before we get a good output. It's the beginning of a scientific tool, where a proof of concept is the initial step. Proof of concept is more important than a full featured tool.
Once the proof of concept is achieved, we will extend the tool further. It will have more features, become increasingly complex. The 'final' version will be, beyond any doubt, very complex.
This also means that once the proof of concept is achieved and we've developed some useful addons, we will be looking at integrating this with other experimental workbenches. Meaning: after a initial proof of concept, some addons, integration is the next step.
And this is where my question comes in:
What is the best strategy given the above (very general) roadmap: "Would you recommend a framework for this sort of project or not?". We currently do not use any of them, so a yes would mean rewriting them using cakephp or zend or Symfony...
What is most likely to happen (I guess):
Once we have the proof of concept and added some nice features, the integration with others will most likely mean to rewrite the code anyhow. So whether you use your sort of idiosyncratic method initially does not really matter. Cause being experimental probably means you're making errors in the first place. And wouldn't an integration essentially mean to redo the work loaded with the experience of the past few months?
Or rewriting the questions:
1. Does a proof of concept require (is better off with) a framework or not?
2. Do addons require a framework?
3. Does an integration require a framework?