I personally use PHP Frameworks like Codeigniter, Kohana PHP, CakePHP, and co. I am a great advocate of such frameworks and I have built a couple of applications faster and more secure with one or more of these frameworks.  Usually with these frameworks, you can develop a working prototype of your startup/project idea within 3days. I also believe African web developers should employ these frameworks just to get to know some computer science theories embeded in them even if you dont like using frameworks, take some time, study the frameworks and employ the magical ideas like “Convention over Configuration”, MVC, ORM, front controller, libraries and helpers into your own development process. For a Framework like Codeigniter, its extensive user guide, flexible standards and friendly developer community online can help a new developer get up to speed within a couple of days. Frameworks will help the average African developer become a world class web developer this is my believe.

Enough of the Framework talks, I wrote this article for PacktPub in UK about the Kohana PHP Framework. I was contacted to produce an article within a couple of days and this is what I came up with.

Overview

Kohana PHP Framework is an open source PHP software development framework that helps php developers to build web applications faster, and also, more effectively by providing them with a set of built-in objects/classes. It also enforces highly organized coding standards.

The Kohana PHP Framework is just like Ruby on Rails; it implements the well known software engineering design pattern—Model View Controller(MVC). The Model View Controller software design pattern guides engineers to design their software codes into three separate parts which includes:

• Models: The objects that manipulate data sources and data stores.
• Views: The html and css files with inline php codes that present the user interface and controls to the application users.
• Controllers: Objects in charge of the business logic, displaying the page(views), and routing the click actions from the views to the model and back to the views.

Kohana was originally based upon the well documented codeigniter php framework, but it stands out due to its strict use of OOP best practices and standards.

read more on the packtpub.com website link: http://www.packtpub.com/article/introduction-to-kohana-php-framework