There has been little talk of development on this blog, despite “development” featuring in the tagline. So, I thought it would be worth sharing some of the tools and methodologies used in building Total Hotspots and other projects.
We use Agavi, a PHP framework based on the MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern. The project was founded in 2005, as a fork from the Rails-inspired Mojavi framework – the same project was also forked to create the popular Symfony Project. Whilst Symfony has built a large developer community over the past couple of years, Agavi has been a close-knit but active developer community as it progresses towards a bulletproof 1.0.0 release.
There are fundamental differences between the design philosophies of Agavi and Symfony, whereby Agavi focuses more on a streamlined core, without restricting the freedoms to use any supporting projects. Agavi developers can freely select their preferred Javascript framework, ORM (Object Relational Mapper) or Database Abstraction Layer (DBAL). My current preferences are Mootools and Doctrine.
On the other hand, Symfony builds features and projects directly into the framework, such as HTML helper classes, script.aculo.us, Propel and a YAML-based admin generator – designed to speed up and simplify development. The Agavi documentation provides a more detailed overview of what a framework should and shouldn’t do. Of course, this is not to say that Symfony isn’t an excellent framework that has been used to create many more excellent services at this stage.
At the time of writing, Agavi is very close to a 1.0.0-rc1 release, with better documention and a shiny new website. Agavi deserves to be taken seriously as a leading PHP framework and build a large developer and commercial following.
On August 7th 2008, Agavi’s lead developer, David Zülke, spoke at the PHP London meetup. I encourage anyone that wants to find out more about Agavi to watch the video of David’s presentation.
I’ll write more about specific Agavi features that we’re putting to good use in the next release of Total Hotspots in a follow up post.
