Joomla vs Nooku Programming Economics
Since we released the Sourceforge Subversion repository for Nooku Framework, we’ve been getting some great feedback, not in the least from early adopters — developers who are already using the framework to build better Joomla extensions.
One of them, Danny Buytaert from Freakout.be, published a comparison between the Joomla Framework and Nooku Framework. If you’ve build Joomla extensions before, you’ll know how much repetitive work is involved. As you can see, Nooku reduces that to almost nothing. Danny’s Hello World extension has only a fragment of the line count of the original, Joomla-only version.
Creating DRY extensions
Rafael Diaz-Tushman at Dioscouri, a well-known Joomla extension development company, and long-time Nooku partner, took it one step further. Instead of doing a small Hello World app, they built a complete Affiliate Extension for Joomla — and they did it twice: once using Joomla, once with Nooku added to the mix!
In a blog post, Rafael wrote:
Writing for Nooku Framework is simpler and faster than writing for Joomla. We simultaneously wrote the AMIGOS Affiliate extension for both Joomla and Nooku, and the difference in the amount of code necessary was startling. (…)
Roger Perren wrote on his blog:
The structure of the Nooku Framework is much simpler and more flexible than Joomla’s own framework. Nooku Framework reduces code redundancy with 30 to 50%, compared to Joomla, by applying the DRY-principle (Don’t Repeat Yourself).
(Translated from German)
Mash up Joomla extensions
The Dioscouri blog post also touches on another great feature of Nooku: it makes your code easily reusable, even across different extensions, or across the front- and the backend.
It encourages developers to write their Models and Views such that they can be used by other applications.
Rastin from RMDStudio, in yet another blog post about Nooku, said:
Surprisingly the Nooku Framework API is also a lot simpler to learn than the Joomla’s native API. You get to access all the classes and objects across extensions using factory classes. That is anywhere, anytime.
This for example makes it possible to mashup different extensions, from different developers, into one superextension that perfectly fits the need of your customer. And as the original developers publish bugfixes, your code keeps working
Getting started
The best way to get started, is by spending a few minutes filling out a form. You’ll get access to all relevant resources.
Worried about migrating your existing code to Nooku Framework? There’s no need: you can simply mix and match the Joomla Framework with Nooku Framework API’s, and gradually replace parts of your code.
Twitter user ‘kproductivity‘ (what’s in a name?) summed it up nicely:
Nooku, Simply programming economics!