Joomla Releases the Joomla Framework Version 1.0
The Joomla! Project and Community have announced the release of the Joomla Framework. Being dubbed a major step forward for the Joomla Project, this new framework promises increased growth for the Joomla! project.
The Joomla development team has extracted and refactored many of the essential functions necessary to create, manage and deploy a modern PHP web application and compiled them into a library of modular packages that can be easily mixed and matched with other PHP frameworks and packages using Composer for dependency management.
How does it help Joomla?
According to the release announcement:
First, it makes several packages, inspired by the demanding needs of the Joomla! CMS, available to the larger PHP developer community, paving the way to build new web applications and services. These packages are distributed via Packagist.org for use with Composer and can be combined with packages from other best-of-breed PHP frameworks such as Symfony, Zend, and Laravel. Web Applications built on a server with the Joomla! Framework will have the advantage of creating, managing and authenticating user accounts; retrieving, managing and displaying content retrieved from one or more databases; and taking advantage of many social media integration features. For example, the social media packages for Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter are well executed. They have a common API that interacts with each of the services, and offers good coverage of each service’s program interface.
Second, it allows a future version of the Joomla! CMS to be built upon this Framework and thereby benefit from the broader base of PHP developers that adopt and can contribute back to the Framework, as well as the dependency management features of Composer. The Framework will bring new rapid development tools to CMS extension developers that will allow them to create and maintain more sustainable and robust extensions.
While it may not directly affect end users of the Joomla CMS, this is a great step forward for the development community and other web developers as well.