Ask HN: What's the most easy-to-learn framework?

I primarily program in PHP. Over the last three years, I have tried to learn various frameworks(rails, cakephp, symfony) only to give up after a couple days.

I feel like I am too used to my current development process yet I know that my current process is probably not the most efficient, time-wise and quality-wise. I have my own little framework I've naturally developed. But it is still a hassle to setup a new project with it. At the same time, I find difficult to adjust to the database magic that frameworks do.

So I am set on learning a framework. Is there a framework more easy to pickup than others? Or is that like asking what's the best programming language?

I know php/python pretty well. Thanks for your help.

"I know php/python pretty well."

If you know Python, Django is rather well reviewed and you can leverage your current knowledge.

I've started with Ruby on Rails in spite of almost no Ruby expernience. I've found that the learning curve for the language was low (I've used PHP/Python/Java before) and the framework was rather straightforward.

Don't give up after a few days. It'll make a world of difference.

If you choose a framework in a language you're not familiar with, spend time learning the language first, then learn the framework. Yes, it'll take some time, but that's what it takes to really learn something.

Frameworks can be difficult to learn if they are designed differently from the one you've worked with before. I've been in your position where I was in a team using our own homegrown framework and was switching to a more widely accepted one. What we ended up using would not be considered an easy to use framework today, but the switch was seamless for us. This was because the framework we switched to worked almost the same way as our homegrown one (at a high level, not at the implementation level). The patterns were the same, the actors were the same, the interfaces between objects were very similar.

So my advice is, with ease of learning for YOU being your primary criterion, read about the different frameworks out there now and see which one works closest to what you've been using. Hopefully you've designed your framework on sound patterns and known best practices and finding a similar one wouldn't be too difficult.

If you picked ideas from other frameworks to implement in your own framework, maybe you can start with the framework you copied from the most.

I know php pretty well, I wrote an entire happy hour site with it. Which framework is better/easier to learn cakephp, KohanaPHP or RoR. I hear so many good things about RoR, but I've never used Ruby.