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What is Devblocks?
Devblocks is an open-source framework for rapid PHP5 Application Development which provides many reusable "nuts and bolts" services. This approach lets your team spend more time solving your project's target problem.
When a suitable solution for a service doesn't already exist in the open-source world, the Devblocks team creates it. However, our philosophy is to group together "best-of-breed" open-source projects for each service. We see it as a huge weakness to have a single team try to be the best at everything -- those who enjoy arcane topics like object/relational mapping or database abstraction will provide a much more robust and impassioned solution than a team simply removing an obstacle on the way to the next feature.
Example reusable services provided through Devblocks include:
- Sessions / Persistence
- Web-based Installer
- Plugins and Extensions Framework
- Abstract Database Access (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, etc.)
- Ajax Request Handling
- Themes / Skins / Styles / Templates
- URL Rewrite Support (friendly URLs)
- Localization / Translation Support
- Mail Parsing / Sending (multipart, HTML mail, attachments)
- Content Tagging / Tag Clouds
- XML Parsing / Generation
- Unit Testing
- ACL / Permissions
- Captcha (Human/Machine Turing Tests)
Devblocks also provides a methodology and tips for quickly developing new PHP5 applications while avoiding common pitfalls and time sinks. However, you aren't boxed in to the "Devblocks Way", you can use as little or as much of the "Devblocks Way" as you find useful.
Some key components of this methodology include:
- Singletons
- Static DAO (data access objects)
Topics
Projects using Devblocks
- Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0
- DevBounty
- TypeMonkey
- UserMeet
Devblocks Credits
These services are provided by Devblocks courtesy of WebGroup Media LLC:
- Plugin and Extensions Framework
- Http Request Cycle
- Web-based Installer
- Content Tagging / Context Clouds
- URL Rewriting
The point of a framework is to simplify development and remove redundancy -- and even frameworks can remove redundancy from themselves! Some Devblocks functionality is provided by wrapping these incredibly useful library projects:
- Database/Sessions: ADODB (http://adodb.sourceforge.net/)
- Templates: Smarty (http://smarty.php.net/)
- Ajax/DHTML: YUI (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/)
- Libs/ACL: Zend Framework (http://framework.zend.com/)
- Libs/CAPTCHA: PEAR (http://pear.php.net/)
- Unit Testing: PhpUnit (http://phpunit.sourceforge.net/)

