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What is phpPeanuts

PhpPeanuts is an open source framework for developing database-backed applications in PHP.

It supports high and sustainable developer productivity by default reasoning and the 'once and only once' principle.

With phpPeanuts you do not build an application from the bottom up. Instead you get one scaffolded from meta data, then extend and refine it step by step to make it more and more like you want it to be.

PhpPeanuts does in general not generate code. Instead it generates the application behavior dynamically on each request. When you adapt your design the scaffolded parts of your application will adapt dynamically with each request. So you can start with the simpelest thing that could possibly work for your application, and refactor later if the need arises, without losing much productivity. The eXtreme Programming way.

Extended scaffolding is now becoming hot in the Ruby on Rails community. It doesn't do just CRUD, relations and searching are also scaffolded. PhpPeanuts has been designed for this right from the start and has accumulated 4 years of experience.

As far as possible, we kept phpPeanuts simple: we did not try to cover everything. Instead we made phpPeanuts flexible: Allmost everything it does can be overridden, extended or refined. Simplicity keeps phpPeanuts easy to learn. Because of its flexibility it remains useful in the later stages of development. It also helps to keep the application itself flexible, easy to adapt to new requirements.

This does not say that it is actually easy to extend and refactor a simple prototype into a complex application. If the name peanuts suggests that it's easy then that is meant in comparison with an other components technology in the pels family that is widely used on application servers for building distributed applications. In order to succeed you still need to understand OOP. You need to know when you need to do refactoring and why. You need to know when to build unit tests and why. Or to learn all that.

Last but not least: we think phpPeanuts is fun. Fun because it takes away a lot of boring more-of-the-same coding. Fun because it helps to learn about OOP by doing, only reading theory as far as needed to get something done. But mostly fun because it supports a more interactive and communicative development style.

On this website are working examples, a list of features and all documentation.
Key techniques of the framework are meta data, page composition and defaults.