Whilst reading the comments on an article listing the virtues of some of the more known PHP frameworks (Zend, CakePHP, CodeIgnitor and SeaGull) I clicked on a few of the links that are invariably posted by devotees of frameworks i had never even heard about. One that stood out was Recess! built by Chris Jordan, CEO of New Media Creations and former Microsoft employee.

Recess! runs on PHP >5.2.3. It’s in Beta (latest stable release 0.2) so if your clients mind that sort of thing, it might not be ready for you yet. From the look of things they will probably go to php5.3 fairly soon, so if your projects run on the sort of shared hosts that won’t update php to whatever you want or you aren’t sure how to get MAMP running 5.3 (me) then that could be a concern. The benefits of 5.3 sound like they might be worth the effort though. Check out Chris’s articles on functional php5.3.

Recess aims at developer joy. Positioned as the little php framework that thinks it can it features your typical MVC structure (a good thing, we are all familiar with where everything goes now) some cool developer tools for model, controller and view creation, code introspection and an application route summary that run as a bundled browser app. The styling is clean, calming and fun. Especially in the excellent diagnostics pages, which make cakePHP’s error pages look a bit weak.

Recess! uses annotations to manage routing in a decentralised way. It’s not to everyones liking, but it puts the routing information usefully with the controller concerned, whilst caching the application routes in production mode to avoid a performance hit. Seems quite usable to me.

Recess! has a nice looking ORM that uses chaining, a bit like JQuery or Doctrine and should be familiar to anyone thats used one of the activerecord ORM’s such as rails or cake.  templating and form helpers that are more like the simple and useful cakePHP system than the awful kludge that is Zend Frameworks forms. There doesn’t seem to be a pagination helper yet.

Upcoming developments include a plugin system, model validation and a improved templating system.

The community at the moment seems more tight nit / leading edge enthusiast than large and the documentation is understandably sparse for such an early stage. Those will have to change for adopters to really have much fun developing more than simple example apps.

All in all Recess! looks very promising. New versions of php are opening up the possibilities of what can be done with Framework architecture and lessons are being learnt from the first generation of web frameworks, such as Rails and Django to deliver developers a more productive and more fun time than ever before. Let the good times roll.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 at 07:13 and is filed under Notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.