In the spirit of some other framework projects, the Solar Framework for PHP 5 now offers a ready-to-use Solar system to get new users off to a quick start. It's not prepared as a tarball just yet, but it is available for checkout or export using Subversion from http://svn.solarphp.com/system/trunk.

The sample installation creates a front controller, an authentication system and a "bookmarks" application to give you an idea of how everything fits together. You can get more information on each of these parts and how they all work on the Solar manual/wiki.

Paul Jones, Rodrigo Moraes, Antti Holvikari and the crew have done a fine job in producing a framework that's not only easy to use but makes building powerful web applications nice and easy. You can check out more about the framework on its site, SolarPHP.com.

That said, I'm sure there'll be a few growing pains as this new version of the site gets settled in, so bear with us. If you happen to spot something that might be an issue or just an opinion you want to share, drop us a line at info@phpdeveloper.org to let us know.

After more months of breaks, changes, additions, and refactoring, I'm (finallly) at the point where I'm ready to call the Solar framework for PHP 5 feature-complete. The first of this feature-complete series is the new Solar-1.0.0alpha1 release as of Sunday, 11 Nov, 2007. We now have at least 80% of everything you would need to build web-based and cli-based applications. This is a big milestone for the project.

Some of the "highlights" of this new release he mentions include:

• The new Solar_Controller_Console and Solar_Controller_Command classes are analagous to front and page controllers, respectively, for the command line.
• The new Solar_Filter class combines validating and sanitizing.
• We've moved a lot of the core functions of the Solar arch-class to their own static classes
• Lots of changes in the Solar_Sql package related to database portability

There's also a new ORM system he mentions - mainly the major addition of Solar_Sql_Model (and its friends). Check out the community wiki for the new functionality to get started.

So Zend Framework is now at 1.0.1, what did benchmarking find? The goal is to just output Hello World with the most basic set of files possible for each case.

His tests included several different methods:

• Plain HTML
• Pure PHP
• Two different Zend Framework versions (1.0.1, 0.2.0)
• Solar
• his own "Cyberlot Framework"

For each stats are included for things like total time taken, complete requests, time per request and transfer rate.

I started the process to submit PHPRPC to the major frameworks. I feel like I should submit it to all the major frameworks, so I can make sure people can use PHP-RPC regardless of their framework of choice.

In PEAR, it has been submitted as a PEAR2 package, in the Solar Framework as an open ticket (so far) and in the Zend Framework as just an idea (no formal or informal kind of submission yet).

Solar comes with a reference application, Solar_App_Bookmarks. As I outlined in an earlier post about views and layouts in Solar, the bookmarks application is extended from Solar_App_Base. The Base package holds all the layouts, and those layouts are what I want to talk about in this entry. Solar_App_Base comes packaged with the Stenhouse CSS Framework.

Paul briefly introduces the framework and includes example code - an XHTML scaffold, main layout files and some layout partials to show the framework in use.

While each of these [PEAR Mail, PhpMailer, SwiftMailer, Zend_Mail] will work with Solar, the new Solar_Mail and Solar_Smtp packages work "natively", in that they support automatic configuration, locale and exception inheritance, and so on. Read on for some examples on how to use them.

In his example he sets up and sends a simple message, setting the contents of the email (sent as an HTML message). Since there's been much talk about the safety of a lot of the mailing systems in frameworks, Paul talks about how it's been secured from header injections, through safe attachments, and from a transport dependency-injection for SMTP.

There's even a method included that lets you take the SMTP information out of the script and put it into the Solar configuration file to use in the entire application.

As I noted in an earlier post, Solar how has classes to represent simple HTTP requests and responses.

The Solar_Http_Request functionality is only for making requests, but uses adapters to make it easier to swap out the connection method later on - plus it's fluent. He includes an example of it in action, calling a remote page with a GET, POST and a customized request (including special headers)

The other side of the equation, Solar_Http_Response allows you to set all of the response information manually (again, fluently) to make custom responses simple.

He breaks up the post into different sections for the kinds of view/layout and controller combination:

• Page Controller, View, and Layout
• Variable Assignment
• Other Layouts, or No Layout
• Multiple Formats
• Shared Layouts

The code in the post makes it simple to add an overall template for the site instead of having to add a header and footer to each view (or where the include doesn't belong).

In this episode, I'm going to give a brief overview of Solar project and how it helps with the mundane aspects of building applications. Solar is an open-source library and framework for PHP 5; you can read more about it at solarphp.com...

The rest of the show notes includes links to things like Yawp, Solar's built-in localization and it's exception handling code.

Check out more about Solar at Solarphp.com and check out the PHP Abstract podcast episode Paul recorded on the Zend Developer Zone site.