The framework

Lion is an emerging open source PHP framework for creating rich web applications as a combination of the most valuable features and patterns taken from the development community:

Dual-MVC: Maybe the most valuable feature within the framework, as a combination of a MVC (push-style MVC) and a MVP (pull-style MVC). The MVP allows to declare rich UI components within your templates, easing the integration with your own event handlers. Lion's component model handles AJAX communication in both ways: Direct and Reverse-AJAX.

Context Container: From the architecture point of view, Lion is organized by context containers representing applications, being one of the most valuable benefits his IoC capability.

Dependency Injection: Lion integrates a spring-style based dependency injection which let the framework work out the complexities of service instantiation, initialization and sequencing. It supplies service references to clients as required.

Configuration management: A .net-style configuration management system based on section handlers and working without being coupled to the final syntax (xml, ini-files, yaml, ...) Lion offers a powerful, easy and faster way to define and manage your configurations and settings.

Security: A Role Based Access Control approach, covering both Authentication and Authorization tasks and being perfectly integrated with the rest of the framework.

Url routing engine: It allows to define rules to route requests based on URL formats. It's built in top of a really fast algorithm to match URLs, which is based on perl-style regular expressions. Lion is able to build URLs from rules as well as determine the rule that fit to each URL.

Request Dispatcher System: Based on best web-oriented patterns, Lion integrates an elegant and easy to use request dispatcher, which allows to define your own intercepting filters associated to Url routes.

I18n: Allowing to manage your I18n literals as soon as you need, perfectly integrated within the rest of the framework.

Facades to cache and logging systems: Lion provides facades to handle the cache (against memcache, cache-lite, APC, ...) as well as the logging system (against log4php, ...) without coupling your code from the beginning.


Take a look at the Lion Architecture section to learn about how the framework is structured and designed to.

Lion framework is released under the MIT license terms.