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There's also the additional question of whether to build or buy. In the early days of PowerBuilder, there were a number of third-party frameworks available. Each had its following and all were quite different from the next. And there were quite a few in-house frameworks that were built from the ground up. Then, with the release of PowerBuilder 5, Sybase introduced the PFC (PowerBuilder Foundation Classes) framework. Since it was built and supported by Sybase, it quickly gained a foothold and became an industry standard framework for PowerBuilder development.

The question of whether to use PFC or build a custom framework is still relevant today. The key issues to consider include the size and nature of your application, whether a framework will help and not hinder its development, whether a framework exists or needs to be built to accomplish its goal. While I can't propose a guideline, mostly because one really doesn't exist, ensuring that everyone understands the goals of a project is key. If a framework is to be used, it's important to understand what it can and can't do. It's also critical that developers don't discard the framework and begin building objects outside the framework. Once you're working with a framework, certain assumptions about an object's behavior can be assumed. If an object is created outside the framework, those same assumptions could very well be wrong.

Again, the benefits of using a framework can be summarized as providing standard functionality so you don't have to write it and a consistent methodology for development that leads to faster development, more stable code, and fewer bugs.

Conclusion
There are reasons why so much time and energy have been devoted to Standards and Frameworks over the years. The more we can use consistent, understandable, and proven methods, the more confident we can be of building stable, robust, and state-of-the-art applications.

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