Introduction to Solar

Solar (http://solarphp.com) is a library and framework for developing PHP 5 applications. While it takes many cues from PEAR for organization and coding standards, Solar is a unified library instead of a collection of separate packages, and provides an example implementation for how to build your own applications and libraries in a predictable and well-structured way.

Background

Solar does not enjoy the popular mindshare or committed corporate resources of the Zend Framework. However, Solar offers significant advantages for even moderately experienced developers:

• Solar is more mature and has more fundamental capabilities built into it than Zend Framework does. These fundamentals include authentication, access control, roles, form processing, a more consistent and extensible view helper system, automated discovery of views and layouts from the page controller, localization of text strings, and much more.

• Solar comes with a reference implementation, Solar_App_Bookmarks, to show how all the pieces tie together in a real working application.

• Development occurs at a more rapid pace, even though Solar has only one part-time committer; releases are smaller and more-frequent, and project response time to feature requests and bug reports is much faster.

• The mailing list traffic is centered more on how to use Solar rather than on discussions of package proposals and administrative trivia; some of the other original Zend Framework authors (of which I am one ;-) contribute regularly to the list.
This article will take you through some of the underlying concepts of how Solar works. Later articles will show how to use Solar as a library system, and how to use it as a framework for application development.