PHOCOA PHP Framework
What is PHOCOA?
PHOCOA (pronounced faux-ko) is PHP framework for developing web applications. PHOCOA's primary intent is to make web application development in PHP easier, faster, and higher-quality. The framework handles most of the "dirty work" of web application development by providing infrastructure for all of the common tasks. Most of your time writing PHOCOA apps will be spent designing your GUI and writing application-specific logic rather than dealing with form data, database calls, etc.
PHOCOA is an object-oriented, event-driven, componentized, MVC (model-view-controller) web framework inspired by Apple's Cocoa and WebObjects technologies.
PHOCOA Solution Areas
- Separation of Model, View, and Controller (MVC) layers
- Form State Maintenance
- Data Persistence to RDBMS (Postgres, MySQL, Oracle, etc. via Propel)
- Controller Layer - Automatically keeps UI and Data objects in sync without writing code
- Web Site Skins / Themes
- Data Pagination and Sorting
- Data Normalization, Validation, and display of Errors
- Web Application Configuration and Deployment (Development vs. Production, easy to use with Version Control)
- Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure
- Component Re-Use, both within and between applications
- Search-Engine Friendly URLs
- Code Generation: Automatically Generates Skeleton Add / Edit / Delete code and UI from Propel DB Objects
- AJAX infrastructure
PHOCOA for Cocoa Folks, and Cocoa for PHP Folks
Know Cocoa and want to know what PHOCOA does? Know PHP and want to learn more about the Cocoa concepts used in PHOCOA?
- Key-Value Coding, Key-Value Validation, and Key-Value Observing
- Bindings and Controller Layer
- Array Operators for KVC: @count, @sum, @distinctUnionOfObjects, etc.
- Bindings: Single-Value, Multi-Value Boolean, Multi-Value Patterns
- Value Transformers
- Core Data (see Propel)
- Interface Builder
- Complete Widget Toolkit
- Formatters
Now of course PHP is very different from Objective-C, and web apps are very different from desktop apps, but it's the basic concepts that we've carried over into PHOCOA, and in many times improved for PHP or web use.
Documentation and Resources
- Intro and QuickStart Guide
- Examples
- API Guide
- Support: all support done via the mailing lists
- Development Roadmap
Related Projects
Dependencies:
- PHP5 is required.
- Smarty is used for PHOCOA's template system.
- Phing is used as a build system for PHOCOA projects.
Integrations:
- Propel, an excellent O/R tool for PHP. Propel is PHOCOA's Core Data analog. Propel is used to build the PHP objects that front database objects.
- Yahoo!'s YUI is the AJAX library used for PHOCOA's AJAX UI components.
- Appcelerator Add AJAX to HTML without JavaScript. Appcelerator is a great open-source RIA platform. Demo.
- prototype is another AJAX library used for PHOCOA's AJAX UI components.
- FCK Editor is an excellent open-source WYSIWYG editor used by PHOCOA for WFHTMLArea.
- DynarchMenu CSS/JS Menu is a commercial but inexpensive (and solid!) hierarchical menu system. PHOCOA includes a wrapper for this system via WFDynarchMenu.
- Dieselpoint Faceted Navigation and Search Engine is an amazing full-text and parametric search engine. PHOCOA applications can easily provide faceted navigation interfaces via WFDieselFacet. Dieselpoint is a java application and requires the PHP/Java Bridge.
License
PHOCOA is open-source, licensed under the MIT License.
Sponsors and Commercial Support
PHOCOA is being used in a number of production applications by our sponsors:
Commercial support for PHOCOA development is available through: