Hasin Hayder has a post about their "yet another framework" they're about to release to the community - Orchid.
Orchid is still in preview state and we are planning to release it by the mid of January. But if you are interested you can check the orchid blog and checkout the nightly build version from svn repository. Orchid is very fast and lightweight and really painless to kickstart the development.
He includes a features list of some of the things it offers so far including segregated template components, partial caching, support for PDO, an included unit testing library and bundled libraries for Google Maps, Charts and JSON.