Seagull PHP Framework

Seagull PHP Framework

Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Content Management Framework
License	BSD
Website	seagullproject.org

Seagull PHP Framework (Seagull) is an OOP PHP software framework for building web, command line and GUI applications. Seagull uses Model-view-controller design pattern. Many popular PHP applications are integrated within the project, as are various templating engines, PEAR libs, testing tools and managed library code.

Features

Seagull offers the following key features:

• PHP 4/5 compatible
• compact core framework with complete modules in package
• Model-view-controller pattern
• performance conscious design^{[citation needed]}
• multiple input and output formats
• integrated object-relational mapper for rapid application development
• loosely coupled components, use template engine of your choice, output to multiple devices or CLI
• caching
• localization. Translated into more than 21 world languages.
• integrated PEAR libraries

Modularity

Seagull is an OOP application with an emphasis on modularity. The framework itself consists of a set of base classes organised according to the MVC design pattern that take care of permissions, authentication, sessions, i/o and database abstraction layer. Each generalised area of functionality comes in the form of a module.

Most task-specific functionality comes from libraries, quite often from PEAR, that can be independently updated when upgrades/improvements are available

Each object in the application (Member, Group, Property, Document, Article, etc) is represented as an entity, developers are provided with tools to quickly prototype entities so that skeleton classes are created and updated automatically

Security

Data Validation

All input data to the application is filtered and validated before any processing takes place. Filters appropriate to the input mechanism are invoked before subsequent validation tests are run. In the case of HTTP input, all request data is first stripped of javascript and leading/trailing whitespace.

Authentication and Authorisation

Seagull uses standard PHP sessions which propagate persistence of user data using cookies by default. Both database and file-based persistence are supported. The PHP engine automatically detects whether the client returns session cookies, if not the session is propagated in the URL. Anti session-hijacking measures are in place to ensure the user session can not be compromised. Seagull works identically whether or not end users have cookies enabled in their browsers. Any module in the application can be set to require authentication by setting the 'requiresAuth' flag to true on a per-screen basis. Once users are authenticated, fine grained permissions can be controlled by testing for role membership.

Consistency

Quality Control

All contributor features and bugfixes are submitted as patches which are subject to peer review and if deemed valid, applied by the project maintainer. A large part of the codebase is covered by unit and web tests.

Coding Standards

All the code in Seagull follows the consistent style set out in the coding standards document included in the root of each distribution. The standard follows PEAR coding standards very closely which is essentially a reiteration of the K & R guidelines from the original C Programming Language (1978)

Standards Compliant

Seagull supports XHTML 1.1, CSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, and 2.0, and conditional GET for caching RSS feeds on the client-side.

See also

Web application framework

External links

• Official website of Seagull PHP Framework
• Seagull Wiki Documentation
• Taking a look at ten different PHP frameworks Seagull in framework comparison
• PHP frameworks comparison (December 2006)
• Seagull in php|architect
• PHPHacks frameworks comparison includes Seagull