Well, after my last rant/blog post I decided that its time to release some of our software as open source. When we build a site, I tend to prefer using a lean html/css front end and use Ajax to interact with the server. This can make for some fresh, dynamic sites and keeps page load times to a minimum. On the backed we try to keep things light, as this is obviously where you’re going to hit scalability issues so the more work that can be done on the client side the better.

On the backed you only really need a handful of classes, a basic controller to handle incoming Ajax request which then process these request, which generally just require database reads or writes. Each controller is generally different for each project, but follows the same principles and requires the same, simple, supporting machinery; database manager, session manager, logging and security/validation.

These classes give you a minimal layer of abstraction, making it easy to change infrastructure without making any code changes.

You could say this constitutes a php framework, albeit a modest one. But, its not really, as these are just helper classes that merely extend the base php functionality.

In the coming weeks, I’ll release all of these classes under GPL for anyone to play with, and welcome feedback.