Andrew Podner has a new post to his site today sharing some of the things he discovered when looking into Lithium, a PHP framework that is "the first to break ground into major new technologies, including bridging the gap between relational and non-relational databases through a single, unified API."

Enter my New Year’s Resolution. I promised myself that I would pick up another framework this year and I had been introduced to Lithium at Codeworks in a presentation given by Elizabeth Naramore several months ago. So I downloaded it, and went through the obligatory blog tutorial, all of which seemed pretty straightforward.

He goes through a "checklist" of the things he'd need for his project (including autoloading, namespaces and integration with PHPUnit) and some of the "extras" he wanted hooks for during his development, several he was happy to find were already integrated. He does note a few places where the framework falls a bit short though, like in the quality of the user guide (it "needs some help") that seems incomplete in places.

That said, I still think it is worth the time and the effort to get to know Lithium better. The framework shows a lot of promise, and the architecture of it leaves me with the impression that the devs spent a lot of time thinking through what a developer needs to get the job done quickly.