At the start of this year, I began work on an iPhone/web app with a very closer friend of mine. Our goal was to build a useable and marketable product and learn along the way, and learn we did!

We started with a prototype (I have it saved and marvel at the distance we took it) like most projects, and slowly built upon that.

My PHP knowledge at the time wad basic, I knew how to CRUD database tables/rows and use sessions to pass and maintain our data. Other than that i was very clueless, so much so that in the beginning i was querying within my markup, functions were not in my repertoire.

About 2 months in, we had our system built, it all worked beautifully! Adding, viewing, deleting and updating items was working as we hoped on both the web and iphone versions of the application. So we decided to do a tidy up of our code.

This is where things went bad – for me anyway.

Because i wasn’t using an particular framework and all my queries were within my markup, making alterations to how information was presented meant that i would need to alter the position of very large blocks of text. Suffice to say it was no longer beautiful, but a bug riddled minefield. You really …