Am I talking about another framework? Well yeah. I thought it will be real fun for web application developers to use orchid to build their apps. Orchid is still in preview state and we are planning to release it by the mid of January. But if you are interested you can check the orchid blog and checkout the nightly build version from svn repository. Orchid is very fast and lightweight and really painless to kickstart the development.

URL : http://orchid.phpxperts.net

Some of the core features of Orchid which I think are really helpful to develop real world applications, are listed here

1. Caching Engine with support of Memcache, MySQL and SQLite as Storage
2. MVC
3. RoR like Layout and segregated template components.
4. Partial Caching in Template
5. Very efficient object loading and dispatching
6. DAL for MySQL (Both MySQL and MySQLi), SQLite, PostgreSQL and MSSQL
7. Support for PDO
8. Builtin Unit Testing Library where you can write unit tests inside the controller without extra pain.
9. Internationalization using Language files
10. Session Manager (Regular and DB Based)
11. Bundled Google Map Library
12. Bundled Google Chart Library
13. Bundled JSON Library
14. Bundled Prototype, jQuery, Scriptaculous and SWFObject Scripts with on-demand gzip support
15. On demand gzipping for javascripts
16. Active Record
17. Excellent Benchmarking and Profiling support which you can use to profile your application
18. CSS based Button Manager (What is this???? — checkout)
19. AJAX Library

Beside many other features it also comes with an exceptional feature which is hard to find elsewhere 🙂 which is the following one

20. Bundled “Colorful Moments”

🙂

Orchid is planned to release by mid januray, as I told. Currently some of us are working on documentation. But you can still check out the code and sample controllers.

Ifthese sounds interesting – you can visit the official blog of orchid at http://orchid.phpxperts.net