Wirestorm

Zend have, finally, realised that enterprise and even just larger scale PHP projects, require more than just PEAR, PHP5 and Zend Studio, whilst all good, what they lack is coordination and a sense of the ‘Bigger Picture’.

Just as Java has its Community Process, PHP will now have a collaboration process where industry and the community can together work towards defining a web application framework and deployment system. This is really good news for anyone that writes site larger than a few pages, and especially when you work on many projects, quite often doing the same things again and again. Most seasoned PHP programmers have their own frameworks they use to make life a little less mundane and build on past tried-and-tested code. PEAR was a good effort to get people working on reusable components, but this is all PHP4 based and lacks an overall framework for implementing these components within.

My own framework consists of:

• a Java based core API – java.io, java.net, java.util, java.lang, etc (I am intending to merge this with cucua.tigris.org)
• a runtime library – class loader, error handling, logging, configuration, etc
• a servlet container – based on the Java Servlet 2.4 specification
• a MVC framework – based on Struts
• a component framework – based on Tapestry

When I can find a free Subversion open-source provider, and a name, I will make all this available under some sort of generous license (LGPL?) in the hope that perhaps some of it could be of some use to some people, and perhaps even to the formation of the official webapp framework.

Anyway, more here: http://www.zend.com/collaboration/