i've been working on an idea for the last couple of months that I'd like to get some feedback on. I'm not quite ready to post any code online yet, but within the next few weeks, I'd like to start recruiting developers to help out.
The idea is an open-source php5 MVC framework (yes, I know-- another one). The ultimate goal for the framework is to be completely output independant. With the growing popularity of Web Services using SOAP and XML-RPC in addition to AJAX, JSON , WML, etc, I want to have a framework in which to develop that would allow developers to code a module without having to worry about the formatting of the request or response data. All requests (SOAP, RPC, JSON) are wrapped in a standard request object, passed to the module code, and responses are similarly wrapped in response object, passed to one of several display objects which format the data appropriately and return it. Something I've noticed with other frameworks online is that, while the view and model portions of the code are kept seperate well enough, they don't parse the input to determine the type of request being made. Because of that if developers want the capability to receive/return SOAP or RPC protocols, they have to parse the data themselves.
Ultimately this would mean fully open web services (wsdls for the modules would be available to any programmer) so that any one could access the data from any front end, be it a mobile browser, standard web browser, or a Java or Python desktop app. Considering the trends I see in the www as far as data handling and user interaction, I think more and more sites will need a way for the data that they host to be retrieved without knowing where the data is going.
Anyway, that's what I'm working on. Please let me know if you feel that a project like this would be useful and if its something that you would like more information on. As I said, I'm not ready to post anything online yet or start a forum because I'm changing a lot of stuff, so right now its kind of a discombobulated mess. Pretty soon, though I'd like to post a short demo of it and start opening things for other developers to contribute.
