I'm currently finishing the architecture of a PHP development framework I've been evolving over the last few years.

It is PHP 5, fully object oriented, and very lightweight.

It uses an MVC architecture, and allows the creation of object / data models with simple descriptors, which greatly reduces development time

It also auto-generates all SQL, so the user never has to touch the database.

Furtherore, it auto-generates HTML-output for objects or collections (iterators), either as forms, lists, tables, or custom user-defined views. I'm thinking about developing a templating system for this... possibly XSL-T based.

Each Archetype object can be retrieved as an XML node. Archetype collectiosn can be retrieved as node lists.

A session, get, post, or request collection can be passed to the Archetype object constructor to set its values.


Here are some examples of how an Archetype object would be used in a page:

PHP Code:


<?php
// Retrieve an object from the database
$myArchetype = ArchetypeFactory::retrieveByPk(1);
?>

<?php
// Render the object as an HTML form
$transformer = $myArchetype->getTransformer();
echo $transformer->render(ArchetypeTransformer::HTML_FORM);
?>

<?php
// Render selected fields of the object collection as an HTML table
$myArchetypes = ArchetypeManager::retrieveAll();
$transformer = $myArchetypes->getTransformer(array("field1", "field2", "field3"));
echo $transformer->render(ArchetypeTransformer::HTML_TABLE);
?>

<?php
// Retrieve form post and save to DB as a new record
$myArchetype = new Archetype($_POST);
ArchetypeFactory::save($myArchetype);
?>

My question is... does this sound like something useful to other web developers out there? I have a lot of work to do to advance the framework to become something that's really useful, and I want to gauge interest before investing that effort.

Thanks!

Have you seen (worked with) other frameworks, for example Zend Framework? What's the different?

I've worked with Zend, as well as other non-PHP web dev frameworks. There are some significant differences between Archetype and Zend. For one thing, Zend is a very complete infrastructure, extending way beyond database, and providing (requiring use of) virtually all components of web development imaginable. As such, it's very complete, but also very "heavy".

Archetype would be to Zend as Hibernate is to Spring. It's only a rapid development tool, not a full web framework.

However, there are also some things that Archetype would do that Hibernate doesn't do (and, in fact, that Zend doesn't do). Native serialization and subsequent instantiation of objects to and from XML, Arrays, Database, Session, etc., would allow an Archetype object to be easily persisted or passed to other applications.

Furthermore, the intrinsic Transformer class is a really powerful tool that essentially separates presentation logic entirely from your application. In theory, transformers could be constructed entirely outside your application (possibly in XSL-T, though I haven't tested the performance of that with PHP yet) and very simply used to generate the front-end of your application, whether that be HTML, a Web Services API, EDI, or whatever.

I conceived the Archetype framework in response to a need for a simple, lightweight framework that would do all of the above. Every time I've built an app for a client, I've revised and evolved the platform, and now I finally feel ready to push it OS, but first I need to see how interested people would be in something like this.