PHP Fat-Free Framework

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Fat-Free Framework is a powerful yet easy-to-use PHP micro-framework designed to help you build dynamic and robust Web applications - fast!

Condensed in a single 55KB file, F3 gives you solid foundation, a mature code base, and a no-nonsense approach to writing Web applications. Under the hood is an easy-to-use Web development tool kit, a high-performance URL routing engine, i18n support for multilingual applications, HTML forms processor, integrated multilayer cache engine, spam and bandwidth theft protection, unit testing tools, and code profiler. It's so small and fast - it even has a throttle for controlling Web server traffic.

Whether you're a novice or an expert PHP programmer, F3 will get you up and running in no time. No unnecessary and painstaking installation procedures. No complex configuration required. No convoluted directory structures. It's all object-oriented, but you can use it as a procedural code library if you know nothing about OOP. There's no better time to start developing Web applications the easy way than right now!

No other PHP framework has three object-relational mappers for data abstraction and modeling:-

• Axon is F3's smart mini-ORM for SQL databases. It's just as lightweight as the framework, and it supports MySQL, SQLite, MSSQL/Sybase, dblib, and PostgreSQL. No configuration needed.
• M2 is the MongoDB mapper. F3 supports NoSQL off-the-shelf.
• Think database engines are overkill, but you want a mapper to simplify data storage and retrieval? Jig is F3's native NoSQL implementation. It's a lightning-fast mini-ORM that uses flat files.

If you don't mind getting grease on your hands, there's a plug-in for fine-tuning and direct interaction with SQL databases. That's not all. F3 is packaged with other optional plug-ins that extend its capabilities:-

• Fast and clean template engine,
• Dynamic XML sitemaps,
• Atom/RSS feed reader,
• CAPTCHA, thumbnail and fake image generator,
• On-the-fly Javascript/CSS compressor,
• Identicons,
• User authentication,
• OpenID (consumer),
• Custom logger,
• Network diagnostics,
• Lightweight subsets of PHP's mb_string and intl extensions,
• SMTP over SSL/TLS,
• API wrappers for Google, Twitter, Yahoo! and Akismet,
• Tools for communicating with other servers
• ZIP archive manager,
• And more!

Unlike other frameworks, F3 aims to be usable - not usual.

The philosophy behind the framework and its approach to the Model-View-Controller design pattern is towards minimalism in structural components, avoiding application complexity and striking a balance between code elegance, application performance and programmer productivity.