PRADO (framework)


PRADO is an open source, object-oriented, event-driven, component-based PHP web framework. PRADO's name is an acronym derived from "PHP Rapid Application Development Object-oriented".

History

The PRADO project was started by Qiang Xue, and was inspired by Apache Tapestry. The framework also borrowed ideas from Borland Delphi and Microsoft's ASP.NET framework. The first public release of PRADO came out in June 2004, but was written using the very limited and now outdated PHP 4 object model, which caused many problems. Qiang then re-wrote the framework for the new PHP 5 object model, and won the Zend PHP 5 coding contest with it.
PRADO is a rapid application development framework, and in its infancy has been criticized to not be ready for high-performance, high-traffic scenarios. Implementations of template and configuration caching in later PRADO revisions eliminated most performance in its architecture, making it suited for the creation of medium- to high-traffic websites, while still providing a rapid way amongst PHP frameworks for the development of interactive web pages and applications.
In the late 2008, Qiang unveiled the Yii framework, a conceptual redesign of PRADO, targeted to high-performance, high-traffic scenarios. The following maintenance and updates to the PRADO project have been handled by community members of the project gathering on the project's Google Code page. Since 2013, the project has moved to GitHub.

Features

PRADO features include the following:
PRADO comes with a collection of official documentation, including a tutorial to develop a simple blog application, a reference guide describing all features, and a class reference for all properties, methods and events. The documentation is available in both HTML and Compiled HTML Help form.

Licensing

PRADO is released under a Modified BSD License, which enables free use of PRADO for developing both open-source and proprietary web applications, without requiring distribution of the source code of derived works.