Documentation

The pimple framework is an attempt of taking the best parts of Grails/Ruby-like frameworks and large and heavy PHP frameworks the Zend Framework and brewing it down to something that is as easy to use - and most importantly - quick to develop in - as possible.

The main points are:

• MVC Structure - implemented as light weight as possible so that you don't waste miliseconds handling too much nice wrapping. Read More
• Views are implemented using a very easy-to-comprehend templating system called Pimple HTML or PHTML - which is in fact a taglib implementation almost exactly like Grails. It is easy to extend and implement your own taglibs and Pimple makes use of the new Closures in PHP 5.3 when available - and if not - uses a included "fake clusure" implementation. All views are JIT "compiled" to native PHP code so no parsing occurs and you can easily view the outputtet PHP code to easily debug the views. This is by far the greatest strength of Pimple. Read more
• The complete Zend Framework included - for easy access. The framework is included to allow Pimple to make use of some of the nicer implementations that would make no sense reimplementing like Zend_Mail Read more
• A range of Util classes that does some common processing and other things I personally come across that seems generally usefull to implement directly into the framework.Read more

A note: I've done extends of Zend Framework and major stand alone PHP frameworks before - and every time the result was the same. It grew huge with handling of every sort of condition - which made it impossible to teach and hard to use. The philosophy of Pimple is less is more - and everything it does - it does for one of 2 reasons: execution performance or development speed.

Also - i eat my own dog food - and Pimple is being developed alongside real-life projects that has to scale unlimited.

A couple of notes: It is a goal (not yet accomplished or fully tested) to make Pimple fully compatible with HipHop for PHP and Quercus (PHP in java) - which both has limitations (eval not supported in HipHop for instance). Also - there might be a fork down the road that will have some parts of the core rewritten in either C or JAVA for performance reasons (the PHtml parsing for instance)