Overview

What is LightningPHP?

LightningPHP is a FAST, mega-lightweight MVC (Model, View, Controller) framework for PHP. Unlike most every other framework available, LightningPHP includes next to nothing by default. This is a minimal barebones MVC framework with no fluff, no complication, and no wasted processing time. LightningPHP can have any PHP Class plugged in as a library or model without custom rewriting or special library versions.

In my use case, using nginx, HHVM and LightningPHP resulted in a 15x speed increase vs the same app with CodeIgniter and Apache!

Who should use LightningPHP?

You will love LightningPHP if you are someone who:

• Likes to keep things simple.
• Wants an extremely fast application.
• Wants to be able to use whatever libraries they want without rewriting them.
• Dislikes framework specific learning.

If you are just looking to stand up a PHP website without much work, LightningPHP is probably not the best framework for you. You probably do not want to use LightningPHP if you are someone who:

• Wants to use a large collection of pre-built functions.
• Wants to stand up a PHP site as quickly as possible.
• Does not care about servicing hundreds or thousands of requests per second.

What makes it so fast?

• It is written in just a single class!
• Loaded models and libraries do not load other models or libraries until you explicitly ask for them.
• Child classes only load a pointer if a model or library has been constructed previously.
• The framework does not assume you want anything loaded by default - not even MySQL support.
• The framework uses static defines instead of variable substitution.

Core Componets

LightningPHP is made up of a few core componets. There are as few as possible to keep things simple.

• Models $this->loadModel('')
• Views $this->loadView('')
• Controllers $this->loadController('')
• Libraries $this->loadLibrary('')
• Configs $this->loadConfig('') and $this->getConfig('')

Each type of componet has its own directory at the application root. Learn more on the wiki.

Get Started

To get started using LightningPHP, download the latest release and unzip it to your PHP or HHVM web server webroot. When you start it up you will see a 'Welcome to LightningPHP' page that comes with a sample controller, model, view, config and library. Use these pages as templates to start coding your app!

Example Application

Check out a complete example LightningPHP application here.