The past week has been dedicated to realizing database independence within OpenAvanti. Although still alpha, OpenAvanti now supports PostgreSQL, MySQL and sqlite database engines through PDO. Since it’s inception, OpenAvanti has been strictly PostgreSQL only with the intention of someday providing capabilities for the other two popular engines.

Work has also continued on the new website, which may go live next weekend, as well as as the new version of OpenAvanti and the side projects that will come with it: application skeletons and the command line utility.

And last but not least: OpenAvanti 1.0.3 was released last weekend. This release completed the documentation project and involved some good old fashioned code cleanup.

Stay tuned.

The OpenAvanti development team is hard at work on the next release of OpenAvanti, as well as building a brand new web presence for the framework. One of the biggest under takings is a new system of documentation.

We started off by writing our own documentation parser after evaluating phpDocumentor and doxygen and finding their capabilities lackluster. However, due to time constraints and a desire to get the new release out at some point, we decided to use phpDocumentor for documentation.

Currently, we are working on documenting the current release of OpenAvanti as the new releases will be in beta for some time. We’re also putting finishing touches on the rest of the web site.

Work also continues to move forward on the new release (1.0.3-beta), which should be available late February, early March. We’re also hard at work on the yet-to-be-named skeleton applications, as well as the command line utility, both of which will aid in rapid application development with OpenAvanti.

The OpenAvanti development team is hard at work on the next release of OpenAvanti. Here are a few items we’ve been working for this new release:

• Major rewrites in Dispatcher, Request, Controller and View classes and how they relate to one another and handle a request. The new system will have a more streamlined and logical approach to handling a request. A new Response class has also been added to complement this process.
• An Application class is being developed to better handle configuring the framework and building applications. This new class handles much of the configuration for you, such as autoloading the library, initializing sessions and storing system level resources.
• A skeleton application is being built to aid in rapidly building a base application. This skeleton includes an authentication system, user and role management, role based permissions, a menu and bookmarking system.

There is much more planned and development is moving ahead on a beta release of the new functionality. Stay tuned.

The long awaited PHP 5.3 has finally been released. The OpenAvanti developers have eagerly been awaiting this release to add namespace support to the projected to improve its usability. Since early June, we have been planning this implementation, and plan to have beta releases available soon. Early snapshots can be found in the /branches part of the repository, but use at your own risk, and don’t bank on it. Implementations may change.

Users stuck on 5.2 have no need to fret, however, as we we plan to support both PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3 for the near future.

Stay tuned.