Wednesday, 7 February 2007

Article: PHP 5 Framework Solar 0.26.0 Released

Dennis Popel in an article onPHP.com, enlightens you about the release of Solar version 0.26.0 alpha. For the inept, Solar is a PHP 5 framework for rapid application development. It is fully name-spaced and uses enterprise application design patterns, with built-in support for localization and configuration at all levels.

He says the single biggest change is a move from the Facade pattern to the Factory pattern for classes using adapters, such as Access, Auth, Cache, Log, SQL, and Role.

He further informs that the front-controller and page-controller now support automatic discovery of alternative output formats from the URI. For example, if the URI ends in ‘.rss’ and that page-action allows the ‘.rss’ format, the controller will automatically load up the ‘.php.rss’ view and turn off the layout instead of the ‘.php’ view with the default layout. This means you can use one action method to provide data for multiple output formats automatically.

He also says that Solar_Sql has a number of little improvements like built-in profiling, emulated prepare-statement using PDO, new fetch*() methods to eventually replace the select(*) method, table-column definition retrieval via fetchTableCols(), and such.