While technologies like MySQL and PHP are now in the mainstream enterprise market, the top concerns for many IT managers are still ensuring that their systems can react quickly enough to the constantly changing business environment and that the cost of these changes be minimized.

Rapid Application Development (RAD) has been a term that has been thrown around for well over a decade, and IT managers have always attempted to utilize RAD-based techniques in order to help alleviate these concerns. But only recently, with the growing popularity of code generation and metaprogramming-based frameworks that assist in the coding, have IT projects been able to really understand what it takes to have rapid, agile development.

We’ll take a look at some of the major MySQL-based development frameworks in the market, comparing and contrasting the strengths of each. We’ll also focus specifically on Qcodo, a PHP framework that utilizes code generation that can create a full object-oriented code base against any MySQL database, allowing a developer to prototype a full-scale application in hours instead of days. We will demo the development of a complete application from start to finish, and then talk about how a framework like this can be used for new IT initiatives as well as integrated with existing applications and projects.