Pherret

Introduction

Pherret is a framework built on PHP5 whith the goal to become “the” PHP framework. It is a web application framework, and as such, focuses on making the creation of data driven websites and web applications to be as fast, easy, and solid as possible for a programmer. Pherret follows the Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern thus allowing it to be the engine for an html application, a javascript/Ajax application, a flash application, a web service, or all of these at the same time.

The following list contains features of the Pherret framework, explained in greater detail afterwards:

• Designer friendly templating system based off of some of the ideas of Tapestry, a Java framework
• Application structure similar to that of Ruby on Rails, a Ruby framework
• Small but nice base object with some useful methods
• Stored Object, a very transparent, very powerful way to work with your database
• Miscellaneous helpful and useful functionality such as a Navigation object and the Creole database abstraction layer

Here is information about setting up an application. A download of Pherret will be available soon.

In Progress

Pherret is still a work in progress and there is much left to be done. It needs localization built in, it needs robust error handling, and it definitely needs documentaion and commenting. There way too few comments throughout the code, though the methods and variables are named pretty well (no _e() functions or anything).

Many of the existing frameworks are based on frameworks from other languages and instead of taking the general ideas and recreating them using PHP’s strengths, they create them the exact same way. I don’t think any PHP framework should base it’s application flow on a huge XML mapping file. That was something that Java’s Struts needed because it’s language is not as flexible as PHP. And Ruby has meta information about classes that PHP can’t duplicate. And ASP.NET should not be duplicated in it’s entirety either.

Let’s create something for PHP. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!