P4A 3.0
From P4A - PHP For Applications - PHP Framework
Contents |
What is P4A?
P4A (PHP For Applications) is probably the best PHP5 RAD and object oriented PHP framework for building event-driven stateful web applications. With P4A you'll be able to deliver complex web applications for your customers in hours, not days, with a great-looking and feature-rich user interface.
Do you want to see P4A in action? Well, you can:
- Take a look at the screenhosts on P4A's home page
- Run the demo application
- Watch the P4A 3 presentation video
- Watch some P4A TV shows
Features (short version)
P4A is based on Zend Framework and features tableless HTML, multiple databases, accesskey support, auto data type recognition, transparent AJAX, UTF-8, i18n/l10n.
What's new?
| P4A 2.2 | P4A 3.0 | |
|---|---|---|
| programming language | PHP 4 | PHP 5 |
| supported web servers | Apache > 1.3 | Apache > 1.3, IIS 6 |
| main library | PEAR | Zend Framework |
| database backend | ADODB | Zend_DB |
| supported database engines | MySQL | MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQLite |
| methods calls chainability | No | Yes, for all components |
| AJAX | supported | full and transparent (classical refresh only upon errors) |
| error management | custom code | exceptions and standard trigger_error |
| supported locales | 170 with custom code for formats | 440 (all locales supported by Unicode's CLDR) |
| bundled translations | 29 | 43 |
| customizable graphic theme | only with CSS | color schemas, icons packs, CSS |
| license | GPL2 | AGPL3 + commercial license |
Features (long version)
P4A is proudly empowered by Zend Framework, jQuery, jQuery UI and FCKEditor and is:
- 100% PHP5
- Compatible with PHP 5.2.x, Apache 1.3.x/2.0.x and Microsoft IIS 6.0 web servers on Linux/Unix/Windows operating systems
- Completely object oriented and event based programming
- Based on Zend Framework 1.5 (using Zend_Date, Zend_Db, Zend_Locale, Zend_Validate, Zend_Translate)
- Stateful as a classical client application
- Easy access to all major database engines (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQLite) through Zend_DB, with automatic data input mask generation
- Multiple database connections at the same time
- Automatic database data type recognition and consequent functionalities for automatic formatting and normalizing (integers, decimals, floats, date and time formats, booleans) coherent with the national locale settings
- Many user interface elements (Widgets) such as single line or multiple lines text fields with advanced rich WYSIWYG text editing support, checkboxes, single/multiple selection fields, tables, buttons, tree navigators, toolbars, fieldsets etc...
- WYSIWYG advanced editor (FCKEditor) with file upload
- Transparent AJAX support (forget about javascript programming, everything is AJAX based in P4A but you can completely disable ajax with a single line of code, redesign one or more or every widgets on the screen after every AJAX call only using PHP instructions)
- methods calls chainability
- 440 locales supported (numeric and date formats) thanks to the ZF implementation of the Unicode's CLDR
- More than 40 translations bundled
- Completely UTF-8
- Hyper customizable with color schemas, icons packs, additional CSS
Awards
P4A received his major awards during "Sourceforge.net 2006 Community Choice Awards", reaching finals in the "Database" category and gaining the gold medal (3rd place) in the "Development" category.
Now we're running for the "Sourceforge.net 2008 Community Choice Awards", please help up voting for P4A!
License
P4A 3 is available under:
- AGPL 3, 100% free/libre open source
- Commercial license, subjected to the payment of a fee
The release cycle
In the latest 5 years we always tried to honour our "a release every 2 weeks" to bring our users and customers the most updated and bug free software available. We'll give our best to keep with this rhythm for the future!
The future
In the near future we'll be working on documentation, we need more line docs inside the source code and we started to write the Manual. Talking about the code we hope to implement more features rich widgets and a better integration with future releases of jQuery UI to bring P4A a new level of "bling".
Our thank goes to
All our community, without you P4A would not have so many translations and so many testers/bugfixes! A big thank you from all of us!
Download
Download P4A 3.0 while it's hot!
Migrate from P4A 2.2
We prepared the Migrate your applications to P4A 3 guide, be sure to check it out.
If you want to try the new P4A products_catalogue sample application, please be sure to drop the old database and recreate it from the new SQL dump file bundled with the P4A package. This operation is due because the application changed a lot, adding more samples of P4A usage.
One minute to help P4A
- Vote P4A for the SourceForge 2008 community choice awards
- Rate P4A on freshmeat
- Leave a comment about P4A on freshmeat
- Rate/review P4A on ohloh
Authors
P4A - PHP For Applications is created by CreaLabs, Italian company leading in web software development, websites creation, e-commerce solutions and Linux consulting. CreaLabs is also one of Italians most active companies in the FLOSS ecosystem, with projects as:
- e-Socrates.org free moodle hosting with ethic
- Ubuntu Italian ISO
- Minibuntu, the mini Ubuntu release everyone can use as a base to build his own distribution
- UCK (Ubuntu Customization Kit), the leading open source software to remaster Ubuntu ISOs
