Angie as a standalone framework?

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avatar chrisbloom7 Nov 10. 2009. 10:04 am #1
I was wondering how stable Angie would be as a standalone framework and would you ever considering releasing it in that fashion?
avatar Ilija Studen Staff Nov 10. 2009. 10:13 am #2
As you can see, framework is stable already (powering thousands of activeCollab installations world wide), but we do not have plans to release it as stand alone framework, at least not any time soon.
avatar chrisbloom7 Nov 10. 2009. 10:37 am #3
It feels like a really great platform to build on - plenty of helper functions and objects, an efficient MVC pattern, and lots of hooks to extend models with. But you already know that of course :) IMO, it's better than CodeIgniter (less bloat, and an actual Model class [see http://codeigniter.com/forums/viewthread/113239/ for my gripe about that...]). It would be interesting to explore building on top of it at some point. I apologize for drawing this comparison, but Angie could be to AC what Rails is to Basecamp.
avatar Ilija Studen Staff Nov 10. 2009. 11:13 am #4
Yes, we are well aware of the benefits and that's why we are using home grown framework instead of existing one. Still, releasing a framework would require a lot of work, something that we can't do at the moment. Sometimes in the future maybe, but definitely not now...
avatar YvesNoblet Pro Nov 10. 2009. 2:44 pm #5
you may want to take a look at the symfony framework. Symfony + Doctrine ORM is unbelievably awesome. Unline angie though it is heavily into OO and requires php > 5.2.3.
avatar Ilija Studen Staff Nov 10. 2009. 6:25 pm #6
YvesNoblet:
Unline angie though it is heavily into OO and requires php > 5.2.3.


Some strengths are also weaknesses. This makes this stack really bad for installable web applications. Majority of activeCollab customers don't run latest versions of the PHP and MySQL (some still run PHP versions as old as PHP 4.3.9).

I see no reason why anyone would want to hurt sales just to be able to use latest and greatest language features. Programming language and framework are there to serve the business, not the other way around ;-)
avatar panosru Pro Nov 11. 2009. 2:13 am #7
Personally I would recommend Zend Framework since I'm developing my applications on that framework and its very extensible so, like me, you can add your own classes or libs which can work as an extensive part of the framework but except from that you can have your classes loaded without having to register them as an extension to Zend Framework by just including them into the script (which I don't prefer).

Angie seems to be a nice framework but its A51's internal framework so I think that etch developer have its own thoughts and prefers on how his framework could benefit him to work better, quicker and collaborative.

PS: I'm very curious about the name Angie of the framework, where did it came from?
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avatar chrisbloom7 Nov 11. 2009. 8:22 am #8
Re Symphony, the command line nature of that worries me. Like Ilija said, that and the strict PHP requirements seems like it would make deployment an issue if you didn't have complete control over the server environment.

@Ilija - is it merely a matter of decoupling the AC code from Angie? Is Angie not stable w/o some of the AC code? Or is it more a matter of just not being ready/able to manage the framework separately? I'm just curious about your (a51) thoughts on it internally.
avatar Ilija Studen Staff Nov 11. 2009. 11:42 am #9
Angie is completely separate from activeCollab code - it can be used (and we use it) in other applications without any changes to the framework code. We are just not ready to release it to the public (a lot of work, "Yet Another Framework" problem etc).
avatar dardarlt Nov 12. 2009. 1:56 am #10
I've tested most of frameworks mentioned here and build some applications (i've used Code Igniter most of the time), but Angie as standalone framework would be great.
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