Spica a powerful, scalable PHP5 application framework that follows the MVC paradigm. It enables developers to write clean, maintainable and extensible web applications. Spica is licensed under the LGPL 3.

It is designed to be a platform upon which to develop complex PHP applications.

Built-in features

• Very fast, lightweight and low memory footprint
• Separation of models, controllers and views in hierarchical manner (HMVC)
• Thoughtful, scalable directory structure
• Architectural event pub-sub system
• Plug-in architecture that is designed to be flexible, modular
• Support multiple JDBC-like database drivers: MySQL, Oracle
• Authentication and Authorization framework that support multiple authentication and authorization back-end
• Flexible session management
• Support multiple database server connections per request, therefore, database replication/sharding, read-write separation
• Powerful template system (supports multiple themes)
• Powerful validation framework: form binding, validation and displaying error / info feedback to the user
• URL routing
• Built-in site profile (site specific configuration)
• Localization & Globalization
• Powerful caching system: page cache, page fragment cache, data object cache
• A "shared-nothing" architecture, which means you can add hardware at any level – database servers, caching servers or Web/application servers
• Code is optimized for performance, scalability, security and PHP opcode engines.

About the name

The name 'Spica' is Latin; it means 'Ear of Corn'. The star it refers to is a bright and hot blue star more than 260 light years (about 80 parsecs) from the Earth.

In fact, Spica is a binary star, and is circled by an invisible companion, causing its brightness to vary slightly every four days. Spica's magnitude is +0.9, making it the sixteenth brightest star in the sky, after Antares in Scorpius.

Notes

The namespace spica and spicacms are claimed.

namespace spica;
namespace spicacms;

Sub-projects

• Spica CMS http://code.google.com/p/spicacms

This project gets started on 17h - March 14, 2009, Hanoi time.