Akelos PHP Framework

Infobox Software
name = Akelos PHP Framework



caption = The Akelos PHP Framework Website
author = Bermi Ferrer
developer =
released = release date|2007|10|17
latest release version = 0.8
latest release date = release date|2007|10|17
latest preview version =
latest preview date =
operating system = Cross-platform
platform =
language = PHP
genre = Web application framework
license = LGPL
website = http://www.akelos.org

The Akelos PHP Framework is a PHP port of the Web application framework Ruby on Rails. Like Rails, Akelos claims to simplify and improve the process of developing database driven web applications.

It allows the programmer to create applications by writing less code than other similar Frameworks, requiring little or no configuration. It also has a code generating system for creating application skeletons or scaffolds that accelerates the process of creating CRUD applications.

Also known as Akelos, is an open source project written using the programming language PHP which is easier to deploy than Ruby. [ [http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_switched_back_to_p_1.html 7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails] ] Applications written using Akelos follow the Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern.

Philosophy

Akelos as Rails follows the "Convention over Configuration" and Don't repeat yourself (DRY) philosophy.

DRY refers to the information being in one single place, avoiding ambiguities. Akelos components are integrated in a way that is not necessary to add bridges between them. For example, using the active record design pattern in the models, it is not necessary to declare the columns in the Class declaration, as they are automatically retrieved from the database table columns using PHP.

Convention Over configuration means that the programmer only needs to declare those aspects that are non-conventional in the application. For example, if we have a "Product" class for the model, the table in the database named "products" will linked to the "Product" model, as the convention establish that table names should be the plural of their models.

Only if we don't want to follow that convention, for example if we have a "products_for_sale" table, we would need to write code to glue that relation.

Sintags template language

Akelos has native support for writing multilingual applications, and in order to simplify writing multilingual views Akelos implements a template language named Sintags.

Sintags also allows helper calls in the views using eRuby syntax like in Rails, which makes it very convenient for reusing templates between both frameworks.

References

External links

* [http://www.akelos.org Akelos PHP Framework website]
* [http://akelos.org/docs/tutorials/booklink Akelos Tutorial]
* [http://akelos.org/screencasts Creating a blog in 20 minutes video]
* [http://www.h3rald.com/blog/akelos-interview Interview with the creator of Akelos]
* [http://www-users.mat.uni.torun.pl/~tomahawk/summary.php Comparison of Ruby on Rails ports to PHP]