Hi All, I’ve been working hard on the PHP UI Framework called Agile Toolkit. Some of you might have already heard and tried it, but I’m willing to get it out to more people. What is UI Framework PHP UI Framework is collection of a PHP Classes which are designed to care of Web User Interface while letting you focus on developing business and ui logic. User Interface Frameworks are common in other web programming languages, but there haven’t been a really strong one in PHP yet. That’s where I’m aiming with Agile Toolkit. Agile Toolkit based applications have a very unique structure and they resemble development for Cocoa / Windows and desktop UI. You get to operate with objects such as Page, Form, Button, Icon. Below is the syntax showing how you can add a button to your page: $button = $page->add(‘Button’); Once object is added, you can interact with it and bind events on it: $button->setLabel(‘abc’)->js(‘click’, $otherform->js()->submit() ); At this time still no HTML is produced. At the later stage, application will recursively render all the Views and collect the HTML using template engine. For more code examples and on-line feature demonstration please take a look at the short introduction here: http://agiletoolkit.org/intro Why Agile Agile Toolkit focuses on getting the job done. You will find a “Learning Agile Toolkit Book” in the documentation, which also explains how to get some practical tasks done faster. You are still encouraged to do testing, but it’s clearly divided into unit-tests for business logic and browser-testing for the UI logic. You no longer need to test some of the basic stuff as it’s being handed by the framework. Important concept of Agile Toolkit is separation of UI logic from Business logic. And by UI logic I mean “PHP code”, which mashes up views to produce your pages. The final code of you using Agile Toolkit looks concise and flexible. Features of current version Agile Toolkit is not just the concept. It is a powerful framework containing many features, the whole universe I might say. Some of the notable features are: - Comes with cross-browser HTML5 User Interface based modern CSS technologies: jQuery UI CSS, Flexible Grid System, typography included. - Business-focused Model implementation, native PHP definition, Active Record, Dynamic Queries, Multi-table support, calculated columns, actions. - jQuery and jQuery UI integration. It goes beyond bungling them and develops a completely new and secure way to interact between PHP code and JavaScript. - Many Views are bundled such as Form, Grid, CRUD, Lister, Menu as well as native integration with jQuery UI widgets for Dialogs, Buttons, Sliders, Growl and many more. - No code generation. All the code is a clean object-oriented native PHP code with strong focus on the "don’t repeat yourself" principle. - Close coupled. That means Auth class by default will automatically use Form and JS components to simplify your life. - Addons. There are many of them, but not too well documented. Filestore helps with file upload and storage, Payment gateways, Encryption, Image handling, OAuth. Addons don’t add intermediate layer between you and service, but instead they tie-in service into the system in the most convenient way for you. Full list of features: http://agiletoolkit.org/about/features Try it Agile Toolkit is easy to try. Download and place somewhere into your webroot. PHP5.2+ is required. Copy-paste examples from the documentation into your local installation. Developers who have tried it so far are very satisfied and are loving all aspects of the framework. It still has some rough edges (mostly in documentation) but it’s ready for use in real projects. I invite you to try it. It’s dual-licensed so that you can use it for free in your personal projects. All source code is supplied and can be found on Git as I’m a very strong believer in open-source. http://agiletoolkit.org/ Thanks for your time. — http://vizualize.me/romaninsh
