As mentioned on Solar blog and a few other places on the web, the stable 1.0.0 version of the Solar PHP framework has been released, marking a significant milestone in the framework's development.

Yesterday, I announced the release of the 1.0.0 stable version of the Solar Framework for PHP on our mailing list. (I tagged the release four days ago on Monday, but wanted to time the announcement to go along with my Solar presentation at ConFoo.)

The Changelog for the release can be found here and some of the latest updates include improved CSRF features, named actions and optimized queries.

This stable release is the culmination of about five years of development effort, with important contributions from several others in the PHP community. My many thanks to everyone who helped make this release, and all the previous releases, better than I could have made it on my own.

In responding to some of the benchmarks posted about the speed and performance of Symfony 2 and how they truly compare to some of the other frameworks out there, Paul Jones has shared his thoughts and process on using his benchmarking system to get some differing results.

Fabien Potencier released Symfony 2.0.0alpha1 last week, along with some benchmarks showing its performance. I am glad to see that Fabien used my benchmarking system and methodology, and am happy to see that he is paying attention to the performance of his framework. I take this as an acceptance on his part that my methodology is legitimate and valid, and that it has value when comparing framework responsiveness.

Paul points out that Fabien's reporting is a bit inaccurate and goes on to talk about how his numbers are off and what a more correct version of the benchmarks would look like. He takes the testing methodology that Fabien used in his process and reapplies it to his benchmarking process using clean Amazon EC2 instances and Siege to run some response/request testing on software running on each framework. Numbers are run for three different comparisons and results are found...but you'll have to read the rest of the post to find those out.

In another of his "Solar Shorts" Richard Thomas talks about the road to Solar 1.0 as broken down into three points that will lead up to the framework's 1.0 release.

If you haven't taken a look at the Solar Framework in the past now is the time to do so as the three biggest complaints about Solar are on the road to be resolved.

Some of the things that might have made you skip over the framework in the past are being worked on right now:

• Solar has been in perpetual alpha/beta forever..
• Documentation, all the cool Frameworks have cool docs.
• Examples, sometimes the easiest way to learn is to study a working application

For more information about the Solar framework, head over to SolarPHP.com and grab the latest copy.

In this new post to his PHPJack blog today Richard Thomas has another "Solar Short" showing you a handy feature of the Solar framework. This post looks at how to send emails.

Sending email using the Solar Framework is not only extremely simple but very flexible as well. Solar splits the process of sending email into 2 logical parts, creating the message "package" and sending the "package"

He includes a code example of using the Solar_Mail package to create and send an email with a text section, a HTML component and an image attachment. There's also a few lines dedicated to the Solar_Mail_Transport component and how you can use it directly with PHP's mail function.

Paul Jones has added a new post to his blog today (in response to this one from Michelangelo van Dam about models in Zend Framework) on how to work with models in the Solar Framework and how the experience compares.

I read the article, and wondered how hard it would be to replicate his narrative using the Solar Framework model system. Turns out it's pretty easy: there's a lot of work that Solar does for you.

He describes the process in a series of ten steps with most of them being done for you by the tools included with the framework (the ones that aren't just setup tasks). The "solar system" toolkit includes a command line application that helps you build out the models and relating them is as easy as changing some values in the model classes with methods like "hasOne" and "belongsTo".

In the latest article in his "Solar Shorts" series Richard Thomas looks at the Solar_Config component of the Solar framework and how callbacks can be used to extend its base functionality.

Solar_Config is a great configuration system but at times you find yourself wanting more, by itself Solar_Config has a few weaknesses. [...] You have a couple options, each have highs and lows related to how they work.

His example is of a custom callback (as defined in the main Solar_Config file for your site) that defines a "_postConfig" hook that lets you inject configuration information when the classes are loading instead of all up front.

As is mentioned in this new post by Paul Jones the Solar framework project has reached its "beta" status on December 18th, 2009 and has just hit another milestone - beta2.

Along with the release comes updates to the manual including a new blog tutorial that walks you through the creation of a simple blog that shows you how create the basic application structure, add actions/views for the CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) of articles and work with local strings.

If you're looking for what changed in the two betas, check out the release notes for beta1 and beta2 (download link for the beta2 release).

Richard Thomas has posted another Solar framework short today. This time it's about OpenID and how you cn easily create a custom adapter that integrates directly into the framework to support it.

Solar makes heavy use of Adapter based classes, Solar_Auth is one of these. This makes adding additional methods pretty easy and allows you to borrow from other Frameworks without having to Hack in a third party auth setup, You can use the basics provided by Solar.

He includes a code example showing how to extend the Solar_Auth_Adapter component to create an OpenID adapter you can use as a part of your authentication process. His Solar component encourages code reuse too by using the Zend Framework native OpenID implementation as its authetication functionality.

Richard Thomas focuses on the main configuration file in his latest Solar framework short (for the Solar framework) today, the Solar.config.php file.

While the subject might sound dark and scary the reality is the Solar Frameworks config system is one of the things that I truly enjoy about Solar 99% of the time. Its that other 1% you need to be aware of to keep yourself out of the rabbit hole.

The notes that, which the configuration file can start out simple (and easy to access inside you application), strange things can happen when you try to access unset values or properties. Defaults can be used and confusion can happen. He also touches on database configuration confusions and how it can all work with your environments (development/qa/production).

Richard Thomas has another Solar Framework Short posted today looking at how to integrate the jQuery Javascript library directly into your Solar application.

When it comes to Jquery integration you have 2 main uses. Calling a php function from a website or calling Jquery functions from php both are done through an XMLHttpRequest.

By extending a jQuery-related controller, you gain some special automatic abilities like automatic json-ification of output data and being able to push out transformations directly back to the browser from a standard javascript call. Check out the post for the complete source code for his example.