Jackal

Jackal is a lightweight PHP framework that attmpts to load on demand only the things necessary to complete the task at hand. Currently still under major development due to issues that prevent easy adoption.

Philosophy

Lightweight

Many very good frameworks for PHP load everything necessary to do anything you want to do whether or not you want to do those things. This framework requires you to invoke other classes via Jackal, allowing Jackal to load required classes on-demand. This makes 90% of your pages load only themselves, since that's all they need anyway.

You call other modules like this:

Jackal::call("OtherClass/method");

Fast

Jackal doesn't attmept to wrap things that PHP already does.

Just as one example: Many frameworks, enumerate files in a directory or directories to search for the desired file. However, glob() is an internal function already supported by PHP which will return optimal results faster.

Existing frameworks might

$results = array();

foreach(scandir("/foo") as $file) 
  if(substr($file, 0, 5) == "class") 
  	if(substr($file, -4) == ".") 
			$results[] = $file;

Jackal does this:

$results = glob("/foo/class*.php");

TODO:

Add information about how to add Jackal as a submodule to other git repositories.