Akelos PHP Framework

November 17th, 2007 Arsen Posted in Patterns - PHP |

Akelos PHP Framework

• The Akelos Framework is Akelos is a PHP4 and PHP5 port of Ruby on Rails Web Development Framework.

Watch the creating a Blog in 20 minutes Screencast

The main goal of the Akelos Framework is to help programmers to build multilingual database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Control pattern. It lets you write less code by favoring conventions over configuration.

• Features ported from Rails are:

Active Record (Model)

   * Associations (belongs_to, has_one, has_many, has_and_belongs_to_many)
   * Finders (not so cool as Ruby on Rails but you can still do $Project->findFirstBy('language AND start_year:greater', 'PHP', '2004'); )
   * Acts as (tree, nested_set, list)
   * Callbacks
   * Transactions
   * Validators
   * Lockings
   * Observers
   * Versioning
   * Scaffolds
   * Support for MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite (might work with other databases supported by ADOdb)

Action Controller

   * Filters
   * Pagination
   * Helpers
   * Mime Type
   * Mime Response
   * Code Generation
   * Flash messages
   * URL Routing
   * Response handler
   * Url rewriter

Action View

   * Templates (using Sintags, plain PHP or your favorite engine)
   * Web 2.0 javascript using prototype and script.aculo.us
   * Helpers
   * Partials
   * Template Compilers

Additional Akelos Framework Features

   * Multilingual Models and Views
   * Locale alias integrated on URLS (example.com/spanish will load the es_ES locale)
   * Database migrations
   * Pure PHP support for Unicode (no extensions required)
   * Unit Tested source code
   * Code Generators
   * Built in XHTML validator
   * Automated locale management
   * Clean separation from HTML and Javascript using CSS event selectors.
   * Ajax file uploads.
   * Format converters.
   * File handling using SFTP for shared host running Apache as user nobody (as most CPanel server do).
   * Distributed sessions using databases.

The Akelos Framework integrates a server-side AJAX layer together with helpers “a la” script.aculo.us, to provide an easy way to build AJAX applications in PHP with a tight integration of prototype, script.aculo.us and the MVC model.

Open source license (LGPL License).