In case you’ve missed it, big things are happening over at the Solar camp. Paul and the crew are getting close to the big stable release that’s been a long time coming for one of the best PHP5 frameworks out there. I picked up on Solar a while back and didn’t find it fitting my needs at the time. I came back, though, when looking for something besides CakePHP and the Zend Framework and am quite happy I did.
Solar is a great, full-featured framework and, according to the modest Paul Jones, has “at least 80% of everything you would need to build a web-based and cli-based application” in PHP. Personally, I haven’t found very much (small things really) that I needed that weren’t in the framework. Even better is that a lot of these have been added in preparation for the upcoming 1.0 release – things like the Model functinoality and updates to the Solar_Sql package to make lots of lives easier. There’s all sorts of fun things with the new models (check out the wiki for tips on its use) including magic things like: “fetchAllByStatus(1, $params) -> in this case, ‘fetchAllByStatus’ doesn’t exist, and the model will return all records with status 1” (as per moraes).
If you’re looking around for a framework to try out, head over and give Solar a look – there’s never been a better time to get started with it. Nothing like a 1.0 to get people excited!
Many thanks to Paul and his fellow framework developers for putting together one of the best systems out there.
Let the countdown to 1.0 begin…
blog.phpdev 
Just curious… why were you looking for alternatives to cake and zend?
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Just to get a full view of what was out there really. I also looked at some of the others like CodeIgniter and Symfony just to see what they were like too. I found Solar to be a good fit for the development that I’m doing now, though.
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Ahh I see. Like I said, I was just curious. Because when my team and I needed a framework I reviewed Zend, CI, Cake and Symfony, I found it ranging from very young (Zend was in early pre release candidate stages) and a little over the top – Symfony was too much seeing as they were doing some heavy lifting with Propel etc – So instead I harvested some classes and components from an application that I had built previously and used it to build a framework of our own. Yes, yes, I know… NIH is dangerous 😛
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