wllm

That’s right, I’m working a new framework. In fact, I’m working with the boys from CakePHP on the codebase they originally intended to christen CakePHP 3. Ultimately, they felt they had to take the codebase elsewhere because they found they couldn’t explore their new ideas under the umbrella of the Cake project. Tell me about it.

There’s even a little story behind our collaboration. I first conversed with Nate Abele and Garrett Woodsworth in the flesh (I’d had a few back and forths with Nate online, but never in person) at a diner around the corner from ZendCon after the final keynote. In fact, Nate was on the keynote panel, and I had just stood up and questioned his integrity in front of hundreds of PHP’s brightest stars. The issue at hand was whether it is ethical for project leads to influence polls about their own projects by “bringing out the vote”. Nate said ‘yes’. I was obviously in the ‘no’ camp. This was the first time I spoke to him in person. Amazingly, it wasn’t the last.

Back to the diner. It was a big congregation with 20-30 of the highest profile PHPers out there. We’d all decided to go to Joe’s as a kind of impromptu farewell lunch. Basically, if someone decided to bomb that diner around noon on Thursday, 10/22/2009, PHP would have been totally screwed.

Everyone was very sleep deprived and one-by-one people got up to head to wherever they call home. But Nate, Garrett, and I somehow felt that we had something to talk about. Indeed we did. They told me about this new framework they would be announcing later that day. A framework called Lithium.

Turns out, they were working on a lot of the same ideas that I had been entertaining. In fact, they had already founded a group of PHPers with a mission to make development fast and fun: the Union of RAD. I looked in to both the project and the collective over the next few weeks. I still have a hard time believing that the stars aligned so perfectly. Lithium = Cake experience + Zend experience + a entirely new approach to PHP development? Count me in.

Although Nate and I found a lot of common ground in our attitudes toward writing and documenting code, we never came to see eye-to-eye on project polls. So, we decided to create a poll to see what you think. The results are in:

I hope the rest will be history.

,Wil