Sprout PHP framework

SPROUT PHP IS IN THE BEGINNING STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT. If you're looking for a fun development project, you're in luck. If you're looking for a robust platform to start building web applications with, you'll probably be better off using something more established.

About Sprout PHP

The goal of this framework is for it to be fast, efficient, lightweight, full-featured, easily extensible, well documented and easy to learn and use.

The Sprout PHP project is inspired by frameworks like Ruby on Rails however, it is not a direct port of Rails. Sprout PHP is being built from scratch using PHP 5.3 and wherever possible, other great open source projects such as PHP ActiveRecord.

Sprout PHP is opinionated software adhering to convention over configuration with sensible defaults and DRY coding principles. Though Sprout PHP is built with PHP, which doesn't really have strict guidelines for how to do anything, with Sprout PHP, there is a preferred way to do just about everything and established coding standards.

Features in development

• Built on PHP 5.3
• Fully namespaced with namespace-based autoloading
• Regular expression-based URL routing
• Built-in support for ajax requests of JSON and XML data, and bare template markup
• Active Record ORM with migration-based schema management
• Before and after callback methods for models and controllers
• Plain PHP templating engine for views
  • Alternate PHP syntax for control structures
  • Automatic escaping with support for PHP's short open tags
• Robust HTML helpers for building forms, etc.
• Support for (optional) automatic minifying of markup, style sheets, and javascripts
• Caching support for view markup and UI assets
• Authentication framework with support for custom authentication, OpenID, Basic HTTP, etc.
• RESTful API support
• Support for plugins/extensions
• Command-line utility for code generation and executing application tasks
• Application documentation generator
• Unit testing framework
• Default .htaccess and .gitignore

For more information on what's been done and what's coming, check out the development roadmap.

Getting started

To get Sprout PHP up and running on your computer:

Step 1. Clone a copy and update the submodules:

$ git clone git://github.com/dmingos/sprout-php.git
$ cd sprout-php
$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update

Step 2. Point a new virtual host or your webserver's webroot to /path/to/sprout-php/app/webroot.

Step 3. Open http://localhost/ in your favorite browser.