Make great applications with PHP
 

simply put: Build the next generation of PHP applications.

We've made a framework that combines the best ideas from other great PHP projects. After using it to build all our projects for over a year, we've made it open source. It may be right for you, too.

  • users

    Download it

    Just unzip and you're done.
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    Learn About It

    Consult the user guide.
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    Discuss It

    Join our community.

Here are some reasons you should use PIE to make web applications:

1. It runs on PHP, the most widely deployed web platform in the world.
2. PIE takes the best features from other PHP frameworks when it makes sense.
You can use any Zend Framework classes in your app by just dropping them in.
3. Helps teams work together on a single project, scaling to as many developers and designers as necessary.
4. Simple, with very few core concepts: classes, models, events, slots, and tools.
5. Promotes reusability. Repackage completed apps into plugins that you or others can use later. If you release a good open source plugin, let us know.
6. Blazing fast, very efficient. See the bottom of this page. For maximum speed, it even lets you use the framework as a library in your script, producing a tiny overhead.
7. Facilitates extreme scalability. Very smart database classes, that allow you to easily implement vertical and horizontal partitioning (sharding) to handle millions of users.
8. Promotes proper design and separation of concerns. For example, "pie/validate" "pie/post" and "pie/response" are separate events for your app to handle.
9. Sensible conventions out of the box: ajax, slots, error handling, with default implementations already done for you.
10. Completely extensible and overridable, via events and cascading file system. Avoids the "last 10% it wasn't designed for" problem of other frameworks.
11. Maintainability -- database schema can be autogenerated from the database. Native support for versioning some folders and not others. Regression testing is coming.

Server side

PHP ON PIE requires PHP 5 or above. It has been tested to work with the following operating systems:

  • Linux
  • BSD
  • MacOS
  • Windows

as well as the following web servers:

  • Apache
  • NginX
  • Litespeed

If you want to use PIE's database classes, you will also need PDO.

Client side

On the front-end, PHP On Pie provides tools that you can use to communicate with the server using sensible conventions, enabling you to do such things as

  • Keep track of asynchronous requests and their timestamps
  • Update multiple areas on a page at once
  • Report errors next to the fields that caused them

PIE tries to work well with whatever javascript framework you choose to use, but jQuery is recommended. In fact, jQuery is included with your PIE apps out of the box, and you will have to remove that reference to jQuery if you don't want it.

PIE encourages developers to create re-usable components for applications, including tools that others can place on pages. Although PIE's core javascript library is framework-agnostic, various tools will usually require specific javascript files in order to work. For example, the tools that come with PIE use jQuery.