PHP Standards and Frameworks

Recently a number of former CakePHP developers announced a new framework called “Lithium”. The project is built from scratch to take advantage of PHP 5.3’s latest and greatest. The current state of the project is exciting as it no longer looks like the mess that CakePHP was.

In a recent blog post @nateabele says:

“Back at php|tek in May, I had the opportunity to meet with lead developers and community leaders from several major PHP projects, including Solar, PEAR, Agavi, Symfony and Zend Framework. The result of that meeting was a set of naming and organizational standards that would allow developers to very easily integrate components from each framework or library in any other. This is a very big deal, and I’m proud to say that Lithium is the first framework to implement this naming standard.”

I find this rather amusing because I’ve been promoting this very idea for ages. Madeam has always been based on naming conventions identical to those of PEAR’s. The reason to use these standards are as follows:

1. Consistency
2. Autoloading
3. Namespacing

I’m glad the former CakePHP guys have finally figured that out. Hopefully now everyone will be able to share resources more easily.

Finally, I got one more laugh out of this from the Lithium website “Lithium is a lightweight, fast, flexible framework for PHP 5.3 and up.”. Lightweight? Flexible? What ever happened to being a full stack framework? The truth is its a stupid idea to have everything integrated into a single framework. It just doesn’t scale and it discourages open communities. The framework should do a few things and do them well. Leave the rest to the library creators. This is the type of thinking that has always been behind Madeam. I’m glad Lithium is hopefully going to move away from being another CakePHP disaster (benchmarks).

It wasn’t long ago when @nateabele tweeted that Madeam wasn’t a real framework when it was featured in PHP Architect Magazine. Its funny now to see them adopting many of the same ideas.