Lithium: the most RAD PHP framework
Written by Anthony Karassavov on Mon, May 24th 2010, 19:40 in PHP
A new framework (still in development) by the creators of CakePHP is gaining popularity among the PHP enthusiasts. It was first known as Cake 3, but it soon got separated from the Cake foundation and Lithium was born.
I've been following Lithium's development since version 0.5, so I finally found a couple of minutes to sit down and write a few lines about it. The current version of Li3 is 0.9.5 and it has quite a feature stack. Nate Abele and the other Lithium developers promise speed, reliability (read security), flexibility and usage of all the new goodies PHP 5.3 has to offer, like late statig binding, lambdas, namespaces, etc.
If you have developed on CakePHP you should be familiar with the callback methods afterSave(), beforeRender(), etc. Well, Lithium takes a slightly different approach and introduces a Filter System, which aims to keep your business logic clean and nice.
You can check out the official Lithium website or see the development roadmap to get a grasp of Li3's features. There are also several applications already running on the framework - the Lithium pastebin and a cozy webchat program.
Some of the already existing frameworks, like Symfony and CakePHP are being rewritten to support PHP 5+ only, while Lithium is entirely written with a PHP 5.3 in mind. Some might argue that it will be more difficult to find hosting services for PHP 5.3, but I don't think this will be much of a problem, since cloud hosting is becoming the preffered way of application publishing.
That's it. Make sure you check it out and tell me what you think. Also take a look at Symfony 2, which also looks promising and will directly compete against Lithium.
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i am anthony - an all-around web developer with a degree in business. I like to code functional websites with beautiful interfaces. PHP, javascript and espresso is a powerful combination.
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