Announcing the Flourish Beta

After about a year and a half of development and approximately 150k lines of code changes, Flourish is now officially in beta.

Flourish is a general PHP library that is focused on being robust, yet easy to use, secure, portable and well documented. It is specifically not referred to as a framework because it is quite different from most of the PHP MVC frameworks currently available.

Project Overview

Here is a brief overview of the library:

• It is licensed under the MIT license
• It works with PHP 5.1+
• It loves Linux/BSD, Solaris and Windows environments
• It includes extensive documentation covering all code, plus the API and other general PHP topics
• It includes features and guidance to make sites more secure
• No shell access is required, simply drop the classes in and go
• It uses UTF-8 everywhere and provides UTF-8 functions even without the mbstring extension
• It supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and Microsoft SQL Server
• It includes support for one dialect of SQL across all database types
• It supports almost all extensions for the supported databases
• It includes powerful, but intuitive object-relational mapping features
  • Full support and auto-exploration of foreign key relationships
  • Simple, shorthand notation for querying sets of records
  • Multi-column primary key support
  • A simple plugin system using hooks and callbacks
• It can manipulate images and automatically detects if GD or ImageMagick is installed
• It provides precise number support even without the bcmath extension
• It backports some PHP 5.2+ functionality to PHP 5.1 such as Httponly cookies and JSON
• It includes error/exception handling and debugging features that make bug fixing much simpler
• It is built with internationalization and localization in mind

General Themes

• Almost every single one of the 59 classes provides functionality useful to end-developers and the class APIs have been tweaked to be easy to use and understand
• There is no desire for the project to provide an MVC architecture/framework, instead the focus is on providing a usable and modular set of classes to help solve common web development issues
• Instead of having monolithic and infrequent releases, each class is versioned separately and the library as a whole is versioned by the subversion revision number for easy updates and bug fixes

Further Reading

If you are interested in some more information, please check out:

• Download
• Getting Started
• How Do I … ?
• Documentation

Thanks

As a final note, I’d like to say thanks to the following people for their encouragement and assistance in the development and testing of Flourish: Craig Ruksznis, Patrick McPhail, Dave Tufts and Bill Bushee.

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