Hari K T has a new post to his blog that shares his concern about a "design flaw" in the component/package methods promoted by Symfony2 and Zend Framework 2:

Looking from outside both Symfony2 and ZF2 is full of standalone components. But the reality is not the same. Though Symfony2 components are split into each components in github, you cannot give a pull request to that component. The tests for all the components still resides in the core.

He points to the Aura framework project as a good example of how to make a truly component-centric set of tools complete with tests bundled into the component's download right next to the source.

As Paul Jones mentions in this new post to his blog the Aura project, a PHP framework, originally targeted at PHP 5.3 has changed its direction a bit - they've shifted from a focus on PHP 5.3 to the upcoming PHP 5.4 release.

When I initially announced the Aura project, it was targeted at PHP 5.3. With a stable release of PHP 5.4 impending, we have moved the target to PHP 5.4. In addition, we have made 1.0.0-beta1 releases of almost all the component packages. (See an earlier announcement from Hari KT.)

The components include: a dependency injection container, an autoloader and a view system that are all self-contained with no other dependencies. You can find the complete code for these containers (and one for combining them all into a single system) on the project's github page.

In a new post to his blog today Paul Jones talks about the next version of the Solar Framework, aka Aura, and some of the changes that have led to it.

Just like with a mature person, there is a great deal of knowledge and craft embedded in Solar, but it also still shows its roots and carries the weight of decisions from early in its life. With all that in mind, it's time to start working on Solar version two, using the formal namespaces and other features of PHP 5.3. There are some other very significant changes on the way as well.

The biggest, most obvious change in the project has been the name - Aura. The second is a structure change - Solar's classes all descended from a base class where Aura's structure is more about independent library packages (more along the lines of the Zend Framework's components) with a "system" package to tie them all together. You can find the current codebase on github.