Legato Web Framework

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The Legato Web Framework is above all a fast and lightweight, complete web framework offering server-side (PHP 5), client-side (JavaScript), and presentational (CSS) components to ease the development and maintenance of today's web sites. It's currently in the pre-alpha stages of development and no final releases have been given, although I do use it in nearly all of my projects and it's quite stable.

Development is currently on hold while I work on getting Game Jolt up and running. As such, it hasn't been worked on much since the beginning of the year.

Documentation has been started for the project, but is currently incomplete.

Check out the (incomplete) documentation.
Download the current codebase (as a ZIP).

Noteworthy Features

PHP

  • Completely object oriented, MVC framework utilizing many of the new features in PHP 5.
  • Everything is autoloaded. You never have to write a single include statement in your code. All forms, hooks, views, controllers, resources, etc. are loaded automatically. You can also add custom files that you'd like to autoload.
  • Extremely functional Object-Relation-Mapping system. Takes a database schema and makes the resources into objects/classes. It's also smart enough to only pull in data from the database that you will need in each particular page.
  • An object-oriented form builder/validator.
  • Compressor that loads in your JS and CSS and compresses them into packages/files dynamically.
  • Caching system that works with multiple handlers, input filtering, authentication system, Access Control List functionality, email message sending helpers (uses SwiftMailer), etc.

JavaScript

  • The JavaScript side is built on top of the DOMAssistant library for selector querying, DOM modification, etc.
  • Has objects for Ajax/XHR functionality.
  • Animation framework for effects.
  • DOM library for getting/setting positions, dimensions, etc.
  • Events handler.
  • Form functions that interact with the PHP form builder.
  • Various extra widgets such as Dynamic Tables, Menus, Tabbed Views, etc.