Frameworks are integrated tools designed to support effective and elegant application development. Ideally, a frameworks should encourage (and follow) good design principles while reducing or eliminating tedious development work. When properly done, the application developer using a frameworks is freed to concentrate on the unique aspects of his/her problem space, hopefully resulting in a superior final product.

IWFrameworks is my attempt to implement a PHP application development framework. Part of the impetus for this project was vague dissatisfaction with some existing choices (like Cake and Symfony), but mostly, I derive a visceral creative joy from challenging problem-solving. I particularly wanted to explore practical implementation of design patterns.

This is really the fourth incarnation of IWFrameworks: at each stage, I learned new techniques and concepts, and recent work with the excellent PHOCOA open-source PHP frameworks (and conversations with Alan Pinstein, its inventor) opened my eyes to entirely different (and better) ways of thinking about framework implementations.

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