[TYPO3-english] Extension developer helpers or speeders

[Victor Livakovsky]

Hello, List.

Can't say, that I'm new to extension development, but also I'm not really 
experienced one :)
I have developed a number of various extensions and every time learned 
something new about development. Most of the time my extensions were quite 
simple and 'kickstarter' was my only friend in development. But once I faced 
a "fat" task with business logic, different access levels and other scary 
things :) I also started with 'kickstarter' only, but development took too 
many time and my power, and most of the time I spent not to project 
specific, but to form generation, field validation, data listings, various 
access checks. I tried, failed, tried another variants, improved them, made 
bottlenecks a bit speedy and so on. At the end, project succeeded and I got 
much more experience, then ever before, but I was overtired and took a 
vacation to recover myself.

So, when I got next even more "fat" project, I decided to use some already 
existing solutions, that will take care of routine. And my mixture was 
'powermail' + 'powermail_frontend' - many thanks to authors of these 
extensions! :) The development was much more faster, then before, but still 
I had to concentrate at some routine tasks. Also I couldn't achieve my task 
with hooks only, so I changed some part of the original code (shame upon 
me) - and I don't like such a way.

Finally my question is: what is the best practice for extension development? 
Are there such extensions, that may speed up development by taking care of 
some routine, like form building, data check, search, record editing, also 
same for BE modules. Also developer should not be limited to the list of 
actions, that extension provides. F.e., If I want to make some AJAX calls in 
forms or add multi-level validation (first user fills and saves form, but it 
is not visible for moderator, until user presses 'validate' button, then 
moderator may edit and save form data, but it is not visible to 
administrator, until moderator presses 'validate') or something more 
complicated, I should be able to do it with my own extension - without 
changing the code of helper, that I'm using.

I've seen, that big amount of extensions uses 'lib' and 'div' libraries. 
Also 'wfqbe' often appear in this list. Additionally 'extbase' with 'fluid' 
become more and more popular.
But I'm not sure, that they are what I'm looking for. Or I'm wrong?

Sorry for such a big message and probably stupid questions.

And thank you in advance :)