John Squibb

Contemplating the next iteration of the negative(-11) Framework

2011-05-28 07:32:53

About six months ago, I started working on the negative(-11) PHP MVC Framework. Having worked with the likes of Zend and Kohana for the past several years, and having modified them for various purposes, I was glad to have my own home-rolled, no-more-bloat-than-necessary framework to use in my own projects.

In mid-January, I released an alpha (Vanilla) under the GPL at http://negative11.com and have released a handful of updates since.

I have used the negative(-11) Framework in several projects, and have found it to be an excellent base. I made the decision to stay within the realm of PHP 5 (<5.3) for backward compatibility on several projects.

Lately, I have been thinking about the future of the Framework and have decided on the following for its future releases:

1. Support for 5.3+. PHP6 is imminent. There's no turning back for me. All of my projects now run on 5.3 installations, and any legacy code has been upgraded.

2. Narrowed nomenclature. When I first created the Framework, I did not want to limit myself to Controllers, Helpers, Models, Views, etc. To remove such limitations, I allowed for any arbitrary suffix to be used to load a file. This proves useful from time to time, but there are also many benefits to using a more restrictive nomenclature: consistency in application, organization, and more concise file structure.

3. Better Debugging. I'd like to employ observers, logs, and custom Exceptions to promote better development. The current system is somewhat sufficient, but lacks in some spots.

4. Better docs. The current documentation lacks a bit. Next time, I'll use a wiki, doxygen, or something similar to streamline the documentation process. This will promote better guidance. Also, PHPDocumentor is going to be used. The style of inline documentation already encourages this.

5. The right tool for the job. Unit testing is a good example of this. PHPUnit is an excellent, out-of-the-box unit testing suite that does everything under the sun. I followed a lot of small frameworks' lead (yeah Kohana, I'm talking to you) and rolled my own unit test suite. What a waste of time. I really regret spending time on that. Support for third-party applications that already do it well will be encouraged. Wherever necessary, wrappers will be supplied to make them work better.

6. An Event Layer. Events are awesome. I'm going to include this in the next go-round.

The image shows what I'm thinking so far.
If anyone has any thoughts, hit me up!
Feedback is always encouraged.

The obvious overhaul all this will employ will lead the negative(-11) Framework into version 0.1.0. As always, previous versions will still be available on the website (http://negative11.com/downloads).

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