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About smak

Let's spend some words to describe what smak is and what strives to be. Technically speaking smak is a modular framework, currently in development, with this schema stack:

Smak users take care of the applications level, while smaklopers, above all, take care of all the other levels.

Thanks to smaklopers work, smak users can build applications quickly without taking care of a lot of the issues related to:

  • database connections
  • template rendering
  • form validation
  • navigation bar

 and many other aspects.

 

What are smak applications?

Applications are just pieces of php5 code, written from scratch, that interact with Smak classes. You can write you own applications or you can use already written applications

     

    Audience

Smak users are usually developers.If you are searching for something simple to write your php applications or to re-use you old php code, smak could be the right choice for you.

     

    Principles

    • "take it simple": smak is written to be simple to modify and above all to be simple for applications developers.
    • "be standard": smak is written with the intention to respect the common best-pratices. Smak also uses well-known and stable *nix software. Some examples are: ldap, mysql, apache, pear classes, smarty templates.
    • "do the right thing": smaklopers prefer to do the better thing rather than the faster thing. That's why user management is based on ldap, not on mysql, infact ldap is the best software to save personal informations.
    • "do not re-invent the wheel": smaklopers prefer to take to integrate third-party good quality software rather than to rewrite it again. For this reason we are trying to embed smak inside drupal. Why should we treat the content (post, pages, forum ...) when drupal do it very well?
    • "freedom has no price": smak uses software released under GPL licence or compatible with GPL.
    • "community is important": smaklopers are not lonely programmers or at least they are doing all the best to grow up a real community.

     

Features

This is a list of features already working in the actual alpha status.

    • MVC: smak strongly follows the rules of MVC
    • Localization: smak supports natively internationalization contents through the famous .po files.
    • Configuration file: smak is able to manages configuration files in written in php format.
    • Forms: Smak gives a simple way to handle forms and to validate the posted content through server-side controls.
    • Database: smak supports: mysql, ldap, xml.
    • Configuration wizard: You can edit Smak parameters through an easy web interface.
  • Applications manager: You can install and remove applications with a simply web interface.

 

    Licence

Licence, actually, is not well defined. It will be one of the these: GPL v3 or GPL v3 Affero. This is the first reason why the code is not released yet.

 

    Status

Smak is in alpha state. We have some good stuff ready but his pubblication is still far, and planned at the end of June 2008.

Right now we are waiting for a very important piece of code that will bring out smak from the alpha state. It's the inclusion of smak in drupal. If this operation will end with a positive result, smak will be reliable and usable soon.

At the same time we are implementing a new concept: "smak extensions". With this mechanism we should be capable to transform smak in a real "swiss knife framework". We will give more information about this as soon as possible.

 

Planning

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