His article shows how to build a web application designed on the MVC pattern without having to use one of the popular PHP frameworks. His message is essentially that you better evolve your own framework that is best suited to your own needs than spend your time trying to learn a ready-made framework that might turn out to be tough to tame for your needs as your web application grows.
At the end of his article The no-framework PHP MVC framework, Lerdorf concludes that:
Many frameworks may look very appealing at first glance because they seem to reduce web application development to a couple of trivial steps ..., but these same shortcuts are likely to be your bottlenecks as well since they achieve this simplicity by sacrificing flexibility and performance. ... Instead of starting by fixing the mistakes in some foreign framework and refactoring all the things that don't apply to your environment spend your time building a lean and reusable pattern that fits your requirements directly. In the end I think you will find that your homegrown small framework has saved you time and aggravation and you end up with a better product.Instead of relying on a canned framework, Lerdrof applies "an MVC approach with clean and simple views and still have all the goodness of fancy Web 2.0 features" using the following technologies:
