Planning for v0.3.x

This document is obsolete as of October 28, 2015.

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Third-party components allow us to avoid reinventing the wheel by providing reliable, mature solutions to some of the challenges in implementing UF. However, we want to make sure that any libraries we use follow our philosophy of making UF ready to go out of the box, and easy for novice PHP developers to modify for their projects. Furthermore, third-party libraries should be:

• Open source, and preferably hosted on GitHub,
• Have an active development community,
• Require no special server configuration to work.

The components we are considering, or have already begun integrating, are as follows:

Object-relation mapping (ORM) for database interactions:

• RedBeanPHP
• Eloquent

URL control/routing:

• Klein
• Slim

Dependency management:

• Composer is past due. However, I am hesitant to make it mandatory, since it would add an extra piece of software that developers would have to deal with.

Validation

• Server-side using Valitron, client-side using bootstrapvalidator jQueryValidation, and tied together as described in https://github.com/alexweissman/UserFrosting/issues/125.

Templating

• Our sister project bootsole, possibly extended to implement templating for entire pages.
• Twig

Rule-based Authentication

• PHP implementation of Prolog (https://github.com/Trismegiste/Prolog). No good because it is no longer actively developed, and admittedly slow according to the developer.