Fluidics: Pithier PHP

• http://github.com/olliesaunders/fluidics/
• License: GNU Lesser Public (enclosed).
• Requirements:
  • Green: PHP >= 5.3.
  • Brown: Not sure, definitely good for >= 5.2.

Fluidics is a library of reusable elements and ideas facilitating terser PHP. It comes in two flavors: Green and Brown.

Brown implements a number of features for more productive programming whilst remaining amenable for use in brownfield projects, hence its name. Brown makes no unexpected alterations to the PHP environment, nor does it demand any divergence in programming style from that which is commonplace in PHP today. The learning curve for Brown is shallow, and, as such, those interested in Green, may prefer to start out using Brown, first.

Green has different aims. Giving no consideration for how you currently program currently, nor making any attempt to integrate cleanly into an existing project, Green instead focuses solely on providing the necessary support for the best kind of programming possible in PHP, and embodies my opinionated philosophy of a better PHP, limited only by the capabilities of PHP itself. As a result of this, mastery of Green is an undertaking (for the majority of PHP programmers) but also considerably more rewarding.

At the time of writing, Fluidics doesn't sport the documentation necessary to fully appreciate Green. So if you're intrigued by it please make your interest known to me, which will provide me with additional motivation to write more documentation.

In addition to Green and Brown there's:

• Pwe (pronounced Peewee): A small BDD framework used in the development of Fluidics.
• A basic code scraper used for the generation of API documentation.
• A programmer's lexicon (technically part of Green).

Can I Rely on Fluidics?

Fluidics is under active development. In the past, I've suggested that parts of Fluidics were stable, unlikely to change, and then proceeded to discover good reasons why they should be changed and did so; such is the cost of improvement. I'm reluctant to put in the effort of supporting old versions of Fluidics whilst nobody is using it and I consider its development experimental in nature. So, if you want to use Fluidics for a serious project my suggestion is that you make yourself known to me and we can discuss (over IM or something) any issues which concern you. All that being said, I do make an effort to ensure that the tagged version of Fluidics are bug free. So, if you plug for one of those and don't mind sticking to it you should be okay. Git also makes it pretty easy to provide patches for old bugs, should they be uncovered.

Contributing

Contact me if you're interested. I have no pre-conceived feelings on the acceptability of contributors.

What now?

Go read WHERE_ARE_THE_DOX.md in the dox directory and follow its instructions to generate Fluidics' documentation.