The Lithium open source PHP framework has just received a major boost: Engine Yard has signed up to be the project's first official sponsor. As well as financial support, the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider also plans to help the project out in other areas. In a blog post, Elizabeth Naramore, PHP Community Manager at Engine Yard, says that the company intends to promote the framework at conferences, meetups and in webcasts, and will recommend it to customers and partners.

First unveiled in late 2009, Lithium is described by the developers as "The Framework for People Who Hate Frameworks". It was originally developed by two former CakePHP developers, Garrett Woodworth and Nate Abele, both of whom remain heavily involved in its development. The lightweight MVC framework for PHP 5.3 or later is, its developers say, highly configurable and focuses on "quality, speed and flexibility".

While still considered to be "in dev release status", Lithium will need to be able to hold its own against a number of commercial PHP frameworks, such as Symfony2 (SensioLabs), FLOW3 (TYPO3 Association) and the forthcoming Zend Framework 2 (Zend), due for release in the next few months. Lithium is hosted on GitHub and is made available under a 3-clause BSD licence.

(crve)