Introducing: Treb – A simple framework for PHP

I announced this on twitter yesterday, but figured I should blog about it a bit more today.

As of yesterday, I published a new PHP Framework on github: Treb

Yeah, I know, the world really doesn’t need another PHP Framework, there are tons of them out there.  So why did I create this new one?   Well honestly, I didn’t set out to do so.   You see at numerous previous jobs: Digg, TripAdvisor, HiiDef, mojoLive — I’d ended up building or extending custom frameworks for those specific applications.

In all of those cases, a ‘stock’ framework just didn’t end up making sense.  They locked you into specific ways of doing things, which may not have been what you needed to do in order to scale.  While at the same time, while they provided a lot of structure, they didn’t provide certain features that I felt were necessary (such as built-in write through data caching).
So in each case, something custom got built from scratch (or something existing got customized).   After doing this essentially 4 times.  I was tired 🙂   With mojoLive I got the ability to take the framework that I’d written for mojoLive, to scrub it of anything specific to mojoLive, and open source it.  So I did.

The moral of the story?  It’s just that in the future now, when I need to start a new custom framework for another site, I don’t have to start from scratch again.  I can start from Treb now that it’s open sourced.   Granted right now it’s very rough as it was part of a bigger system and was just ripped out.  But it’s a good starting point.

Will anyone else end up using it?  I dunno, and that wasn’t the goal of releasing it.  I will say that of others that have used this, they enjoyed it, in it’s simplicity.  And new coders to mojoLive were committing code against it on the first day.  So that’s gotta say something.
If you’d like to know more, you can read up about it on Treb’s home, and start reading it’s documentation as well.

NOTE: I’ve already been called out for Treb not having tests.  No, it doesn’t, I wouldn’t argue if it began acquiring them, but it doesn’t have tests written for it because it’s a child of a rapid-startup-culture web application.  I plan on writing up another blog post about that soon.

At my new job … HiiDef / Goodsie

It’s been too long (as usual) between my posts. But I honestly hope to remedy that now. For the last year-ish of my life I’ve made very scant blog posts. Primarily because I was working at Zend as Editor-in-Chief of DevZone and the bulk of my creative writing juices were being spent there. It’s amazingly hard to focus on writing in two places at once.

But as of 2 weeks ago, I started my new job and I’ve been very excited about it so far. I’ve joined the team over at HiiDef, which is a web incubator/holding company for lack of a better description. Basically they come up with some great web 2.0 styled websites, so far, more focused in nature, and they bring them to life. It’s a very eclectic team of people that are 100% remote though mostly clustered on the East Coast of the US. They’ve focused on hiring the ‘right people’ regardless of what technology base said people used. And hence with their three projects they currently have going, one is Python/Django, one is Ruby on Rails and the other, is PHP.

That’s where I came in. Their newest product is Goodsie, which is built on PHP/MySQL. It’s a website that’s designed to make it easy for people to create a storefront online and sell their goods. But to offer an easy way to truly configure that website to be a custom storefront, versus other options (Ebay, Etsy), where things are far more cookie cutter.

It’s “[pretty close]” to launching. Though without a firm date. I was brought on board to take over as Lead Developer for the project which had previously been worked on by a part-time contractor, so that they could have a full-time guy to take it from 80% to launch and beyond.

Anyway, it’s been an exciting first couple weeks and everyone here is a great attitude about how a company should be run and the value of employees.

The future is looking bright. (Though a bit covered in snow at the moment)