I've been working on Cgiapp in the past few months, in particular to introduce one possibility for a Front Controller class. To test out ideas, I've decided to port areas of my personal site to Cgiapp2 using the Front Controller. Being the programmer I am, I quickly ran into some areas where I needed some reusable code — principally for authentication and input handling.

I've been exposed to a ton of good code via PEAR, Solar, eZ components, and Zend Framework. However, I have several criteria I need met:

• I want PHP5 code. I'm coding in PHP5, I should be able to use PHP5 libraries, not PHP4 libraries that work in PHP5 but don't take advantage of any of its features.
• I prefer few dependencies, particularly lock-in with existing frameworks. If I want to swap out a storage container from one library and use one from another, I should be free to do so without having to write wrappers so they'll fit with the framework I've chosen. Flexibility is key.
• Stable API. I don't want to have to change my code every few weeks or months until the code is stable.
• I should be able to understand the internals quickly.

So what did I choose? To reinvent the wheel, of course!

To that end, I've opened a new PEAR channel that I'm calling PHLY, the PHp LibrarY, named after my blog. The name implies soaring, freedom, and perhaps a little silliness.

It is designed with the following intentions:

• Loosely coupled; dependencies should be few, and no base class should be necessary.
• Extendible; all classes should be easily extendible. This may be via observers, interfaces, adapters, etc. The base class should solve 80% of usage, and allow extensions to the class to fill in the remainder.
• Designed for PHP5 and up; all classes should make use of PHP5's features.
• Documented; all classes should minimally have excellent API-level documentation, with use cases in the class docblock.
• Tested; all classes should have unit tests accompanying them.
• Open source and commercial friendly; all classes should use a commercial-friendly open source license. The BSD license is one such example.

Please feel free to use this code however you will. Comments, feedback, and submissions are always welcome.