The Toadsuck Project for PHP

What is the Toadsuck Project?

It is a "glue" project created by Josh Moody to bring together the components you need to build an application without all the overhead and learning curve associated with the big PHP frameworks.

The Toadsuck Project is NOT a framework.

I appreciate the hard work that has gone into creating these amazing PHP frameworks. I just think full stack frameworks are overkill for many developers working on small-ish projects.

Here's what I really need when writing applications (alphabetically):

• Configuration Management
  • Has to support per-environment settings (local, test, stage, prod)
• Database Abstraction
• Routing
• Templating
  • Native PHP. I don't need a templating language - I have PHP.
• Unit Tests

Not strictly required, but very useful:

• Object-oriented abstraction for HTTP requests/responses
• Form Validation

The goal of this project is to combine into a cohesive package some of the best components in the community to meet these needs. There are over 20,000 libraries available on Packagist. Surely there is one there to fit just about every need.

This is also an experiment to see if you really can build a system composed entirely of other components without actually using a framework (or building a framework in the process).

At present, the Toadsuck project consists of 2 main projects:

• Toadsuck.Core : A front controller that provides routing and dispatching. Includes the following components:

  • Config Management - FuelPHP\Config
  • Database Abstraction - Illuminate\Database
  • Form Validation - Still looking.
  • HTTP Abstraction Symfony\HttpFoundation
  • Routing - Aura.Router
  • Templates - Plates
  • Unit Tests - PHPUnit (of course, why use anything else?)

• Toadsuck.Skeleton: A simple web application skeleton implementing the Toadsuck.Core features.

Check back soon to see how the project is progressing.