Say Hello to Friendly
Welcome to the website for Friendly, a simple, lightweight framework that makes developing PHP applications a lot simpler and less stressful. I’ve been developing Friendly over the past 8-9 months as a tool for situations when more advanced frameworks like Ruby on Rails were not an option. I could (and have) go on and on about the story and philosophy of Friendly, but for now I’m just eager to get this thing out the door and see what people think.
Friendly 1.0d1, our first public release, is stable and feature complete in the sense that everything needed for day-to-day application development under Friendly is present, although I’ve got a list of planned features a mile long that just didn’t make the cutoff date for this version. The documentation is a little sparse at the moment, but I’ve written a nice little Getting Started page that gives you the basics, and my goal is to have the beginnings of the API reference in place in the next week or so.
Friendly is a pretty sparse API, and that’s intentional: I wanted to clarify the 1,000+ functions of the PHP API into those few that I use on a regular basis, and extend them to make them more powerful. So you can certainly continue to use mysql_query() to talk to your database, but my hope is you’ll forget all about that once you’ve used Friendly’s find_by_sql().
I also made the conscious decision to support older versions of PHP as fully as the latest ones; while some other frameworks out there require PHP 5.x, Friendly will run just fine under PHP 4.2. That’s because Friendly was born of a need to inject some modern, MVC-style power into a hosting environment that couldn’t be configured to run Rails or Django. I feel pretty strongly that you shouldn’t have to learn a whole new set of tricks or upgrade to a more expensive (and usually harder-to-manage) hosting situation just to bring some clarity and power to your web development, so I’m committed to maintaining PHP 4 support for the forseeable future.
Right now MySQL is the only supported database, and originally I hadn’t planned to ever include support for anything else. However I know a lot of people are getting into PostgreSQL, and some developers may find themselves needing to integrate Friendly apps into an Oracle or Microsoft server environment at some point. So support for non-MySQL databases is on the way — I plan to have at least Postgres support in place before 1.0 Final. (And when will that be? Not sure yet, probably in late Spring.)
Friendly is open source software released under the MIT license. That license doesn’t require that you submit any changes you might make to the source code as patches, but contributing is certainly a neighborly thing to do and much appreciated. There’s not yet a proper mechanism in place for submitting a patch, but if you’ve got a suggestion or some fresh code, just send me an e-mail at the address in the next paragraph.
Yes, I know — there’s a lot missing from this site, like API documentation. But I’ll be working to fill in the gaps over the next couple of weeks. While end-user support is not really available for Friendly, I welcome questions and bug reports via e-mail (even though I can’t promise to be able to respond right away), at info@friendlyphp.org. Developer forums are also on the way real soon.