Klaus Silveira has submitted a project he's been working on to make browsing through git repositories a bit simpler with a local tool - gitlist.

GitList is an elegant and modern web interface for interacting with multiple git repositories. It allows you to browse repositories using your favorite browser, viewing files under different revisions, commit history, diffs. It also generates RSS feeds for each repository, allowing you to stay up-to-date with the latest changes anytime, anywhere. GitList was written in PHP, on top of the Silex microframework and powered by the Twig template engine. This means that GitList is easy to install and easy to customize. Also, the GitList gorgeous interface was made possible due to Bootstrap.

Since it's just a PHP-based application, installing it is as easy as cloning the source to a web-accessible directory and setting up a "config.ini" file with your settings. You can find out more about this project based on the popular Silex microframework on its GitHub page.

Martin Sikora has shared some of his experience with setting up a Silex instance to work with Doctrine2 in a new post to his blog. The popular microframework comes with a built-in Doctrine service provider, so integration isn't overly difficult.

Silex is great for its simplicity, however for larger projects you probably want to use some ORM like Doctrine but there's build-in service provider only for Doctrine DBAL and not ORM.

He breaks it up into five smaller steps, each with code samples to help clarify:

• Doctrine 2 ORM Service Provider
• Create your entity classes
• Mind Doctrine DBAL and Doctrine ORM versions
• Doctrine CLI
• Working with Doctrine ORM

Following up from his (now infamous) MicroPHP manifesto, Ed Finkler has this new post to his blog answering some of the common questions he's gotten about his beliefs.

My previous post, The MicroPHP Manifesto, resulted in much excitement. In between fits of rage and crying, I found some time to answer folks questions, and also discuss the topic on the /dev/hell podcast with my cohost Chris Hartjes. To summarize and address some of the common questions, I felt I should write a small FAQ.

Questions asked so far include:

• So you think full-stack frameworks suck?
• You need a large framework to enforce best practices!
• You should check out my microframework!
• How do you choose what gets listed in the MicroPHP code collection?
• Why do you hate Rush?

If you have a question you don't see listed, drop him a note and he'll add to the post with more answers.

Lukas Smith has a new post to his blog today with his own take on the MicroPHP manifesto that was posted by Ed Finkler recently. Lukas shares his thoughts on when he sees each type of framework (micro/full stack) has its place and how the project or development team can influence this choice.

Ed's recent blog post labeled the The MicroPHP Manifesto got a lot of attention. [...] In general I totally agree with Ed on the point that we need more decoupled components in the PHP world. The timing seems a bit odd since exactly that seems to be an emerging trend with all the various libraries cropping up since PHP 5.3.

He gets into more of his thoughts comparing the recently popular microframeworks to the full stack, broad use case frameworks that try to provide everything you might need. He talks about the difference between them related to configuration over code and when he sees is a good shifting point to move from the simpler micro world to the full stack (hint: business logic).

So the key take a way point is that when choosing to go micro or full stack its very important to consider in what kind of company on what kind of products you are working on.

On ZendCasts.com today there's a new screencast in their "Building a JSON endpoint with the Slim microframework" series - part two focusing on jQuery integration. (Part one is here)

[This screencast is] part 2 in a series on building a JSON end-point. We're using simple RESTful verbage to grab a list of names from a session store.

You'll need to have the base scripts created in part one to follow along effectively. He picks up right where the previous part ends, creating a new view that uses some simple javascript (jQuery) code to pull the "names" values from his simple JSON endpoint. Also included is an example of a form for adding a new name to the list. The full source for the example can be found over on github.

On ZendCasts.com today, the next part of their series looking at using the Slim microframework has been posted. This is part one of a tutorial building a JSON endpoint for a web service.

You'll need some of the base that he created in this previous screencast to follow along (the basic structure, really). His takes his basic "hello world" application and builds on it to add a "model" to pull name data from and has the "/names" action respond with a JSON-formatted message (and an "application/json" content-type). His "model" pulls the data out with findAll() and find() methods.

You can grab the source to follow along.

On the ZendCasts.com site today, they branch out from just talking about Zend Framework-related topics and take a look at he Slim micro-framework in this new screencast.

He introduces the framework as a light-weight, easy to use tool that doesn't include "all of that extra stuff". He walks you through the creation of a (very) simple site that includes some basic templating too. At the end of the screencast he hints at the next part of the series - creating a simple JSON endpoint as a RESTful web service.

You can find out more about the Slim framework on its site that includes documentation and a PHPDoc generated manual for every part of the code.

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial from Jason Gilmore about building a simple RESTful API with Slim, a microframework for PHP.

Although a relatively new entrant in the PHP framework sweepstakes, I've been lately quite intrigued by Slim, a slick RESTful microframework modeled after Ruby's Sinatra, which is coincidentally by far my favorite microframework available for any programming language. In this article I'll show you just how easy it is to get started building a powerful RESTful API using this streamlined framework.

Setup of the framework is as simple as downloading the latest copy from its github repository. It can then be included and used to make the simple routes in his examples. He uses a "games" request type to show how to handle GET, POST and PUT requests through Slim's simple interface.

On NetTuts.com today there's a new tutorial posted about using a microframework for prototyping an application you may not need a full stack framework to get running. Their examples are based on the Slim framework.

Let's face it: we all have great ideas for a web application. Whether you write them down on paper or remember them using your eidetic memory, there comes a point when you want test whether or not your idea is really viable. In this tutorial, we'll use a micro framework, a templating language and an ORM to rapidly develop an application prototype.

There's an introduction to help you get Slim, some extras, Twig templating and Paris and Idorm set up and working happily together. There's code included for bootstrapping the application, creating a few routes, building models and using them to pull data from the database. They also create an "admin" area for their sample blog application, building an "add article" form and protecting it with a simple login system. You can download the source if you'd like to see it all working together.

Continuing on with his previous investigations into microframworks and what it takes to create them, Gonzalo Ayuso has posted his second part of the series - a look at working on the command line.

In my last post we spoke about building a small microframework with PHP. The main goal of this kind of framework was to be able to map urls to plain PHP classes and become those classes easily testeable with PHPUnit. Now we're going to take a step forward. [...] It's pretty straightforward to create a command line interface (CLI) for our microframework.

He shows how to use the getopt function and the $GLOBALS superglobal to pull in arguments given to the command line script. He hooks this into the framework and makes it possible to define the controller and action to execute (with a few examples to show it in action). You can find this updated code on his github account.