More on Reflex

I’m sorry, Reflex won’t be ready in august as promised. I’ve tried put this fuzzy artificial deadline thinking that some pressure will help me do things faster, but it didn’t work at all. I believe it could have been done by rushing some design decisions, something I don’t like and decided not to do. And there are many design decisions to be done in Reflex.

I think the project is becoming bigger than I first expected which is, in part, responsible of this delay. Currently, Reflex has:

• a database abstraction layer with a special PHP-made syntax for database queries;
• a database manager that create and drop tables and fields in the database as required by modules;
• a record class reminding me ruby on rails’ active record;
• an event system to implement many automatic behaviours;
• a template system that can be compiled to dynamic PHP code, static HTML file, or a mix of the two;
• a completely hookable administration interface (half done); and
• basic modules for static pages, weblogs and comments (half done).

As I said before, the idea behind Reflex is to have a good framework for creating web applications that can simultaneously share the same database while making it easy to design a completely custom website layout (including URL layouts). What links these two concepts together is a template system inspired from the one in Movable Type, but that can handle arbitrary datatypes instead of just weblog entries and comments.

Well, I’ve said enough for now. I’d better return to work if I want this ready one day. Feel free to add your thoughts, comments, suggestions, questions to the discussion below.