The koinit committee of decisions has decided to start coding from scratch. Yep, right from the beginning. The entire application is being scrapped. It’s a lot of fun starting with nothing. Video game football is also fun.

The advantage of using a framework for a web application is to speed up the development process. One is able to skip writing a lot of code that would be similar for any application and start coding the ‘custom’ functionality right away. Of course, if you don’t know the framework, you can’t do that. It can be pretty appealing to just start writing your code from scratch, because you can do what you know. Building off other peoples code means you need to read documentation, examples, and if you’re smart, the actual code of the framework.

This is why I am playing Madden right now instead of coding. It’s a lot more fun.

As you can tell, my first accomplishment on this application was to design some logos, create a colour scheme and so on - for this development site. Yes, that’s probably going the wrong way. I would imagine a lot of programmers like to dive right into the code.

I guess I find the design aspect to be the most exciting part. Why else would I do it first? I also have a design and a couple variations already worked up in photoshop for the actual site.

I hope I haven’t gotten to far ahead of myself. Next up is user authentication. Not as much fun, but once that’s over we can start to get into the real meat of the application logic.

It was decided a while back that koinit would be developed using the CakePHP framework. Cake offers a pretty impressive MVC structure to speed up development. If you aren’t familiar with the Model-View-Controller architecture then now is the time to look it.