history.html

<h1>History of Agile Toolkit</h1>
<p>Agile Toolkit have a rich history. It's been called previously as AModules and have been started in 1999. Library have been completely rewritten several times throughout it's lifespan - when first migrated PHP4 and when alpha version of PHP5 (Zend2) become available.</p>

<p>Toolkit have been heavily influenced by Object-Oriented windowed environment. For instance reliance on "init" method as a secondary constructor comes from Turbo Vision and many of other approaches are coming from Object Windows frameworks and Objective C / Cocoa used in Apple UI. The true goal however was to keep flexibility required by Web projects, instead of porting concepts.</p>

<p>Historically by several measurements Agile Toolkit and it's anchestors have introduced several concepts before other frameworks did. For example dynamic queries were used in AModules3 since 2004 for both queries, updates, deletes and other operations. Even today many frameworks only have "select" support for dynamic queries.</p>

<table border=1 width=100%>
<tr><th>Feature<br/></th><th>a-modules<br/>(1999-2002)</th><th>Amodules-2<br/>(2001-2004)</th><th>AModules3<br/>(2003-2010)</th><th>Agile Toolkit<br/>(Since 2010)</th></tr>

<tr>
 <td>License</td>
 <td>Proprietary</td>
 <td>LGPL</td>
 <td>GPL</td>
 <td>AGPL / Commercial</td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td>Most recent release</td>
 <td>-</td>
 <td><a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/amodules2/">v2.2 (2004-04-23)</a>
 <td><a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/amodules3/">v3.0.1 (2007-01-18)</a>
 <td><a href="http://github.com/atk4/atk4">master branch</a>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td>Language Requriement</td>
 <td>PHP3</td>
 <td>PHP4</td>
 <td>PHP5</td>
 <td>PHP5.3</td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td>Target Software</td>
 <td>Administration Systems</td>
 <td>Administration Systems</td>
 <td>Web Backend and Portals</td>
 <td>Software as a Service, Web 2.0</td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td>Object Oriented Structure</td>
 <td>-</td>
 <td>partial</td>
 <td>full</td>
 <td>full</td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td>Model-View-Controller</td>
 <td>partial</td>
 <td>-</td>
 <td>-</td>
 <td>full</td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td>Dynamic SQL</td>
 <td>-</td>
 <td>-</td>
 <td>full</td>
 <td>full</td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td>Templates</td>
 <td>-</td>
 <td>-</td>
 <td>full</td>
 <td>full</td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td>Deployed projects</td>
 <td>~50</td>
 <td>~70</td>
 <td>~120</td>
 <td>over 100 and growing</td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td>Javascript Library</td>
 <td>-</td>
 <td>-</td>
 <td>Custom JS Library</td>
 <td>jQuery UI based</td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td>JavaScript Events</td>
 <td>-</td>
 <td>-</td>
 <td>-</td>
 <td>full suport</td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td>Speed</td>
 <td>fast</td>
 <td>extra fast</td>
 <td>extra fast</td>
 <td>extra fast</td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td>Flexible Directory Structure</td>
 <td>-</td>
 <td>-</td>
 <td>-</td>
 <td>through PathFinder</td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td>Extensions</td>
 <td>-</td>
 <td>partial</td>
 <td>partial</td>
 <td>full</td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td>Database Update Scripts</td>
 <td>-</td>
 <td>yes</td>
 <td>yes</td>
 <td>yes</td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td>Advanced Error Logging</td>
 <td>-</td>
 <td>-</td>
 <td>yes, Logger</td>
 <td>yes, Logger</td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td>Page Content Freedom</td>
 <td>-</td>
 <td>limited</td>
 <td>flexible</td>
 <td>flexible</td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td>Routing</td>
 <td>direct access to files</td>
 <td>single point entry</td>
 <td>single point entry</td>
 <td>single point entry</td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td>Adoption of new PHP features</td>
 <td>sessions, arrays</td>
 <td>classes, objects</td>
 <td>exceptions, unification</td>
 <td>closures, catchall, access control</td>
</tr>

</table>