The Ethanica Project
Roughly a year ago, two PHP developers came up with an idea that would make the Zend Framework project faster, and better usuable in shared hosting environments. Unaware of each others existence, they keep the idea in the back of their minds. A year later, these two developers found each other, and a couple of other people who like the idea as well, and a project was born.
So, what is it?
Ethanica is an implementation of the Zend Framework project (to be precise: a freeze of the 1.7.0 release) in C, as a PHP Extensions. The developers of Ethanica believe this will speed up the framework, make it easier for shared hosting environments by providing a solid and simple solution to enable the Zend Framework on some or all hosted websites, and a lot more. Besides the gains from the module itself, the project members also hope to extend their knowledge based on the experience gained from the module, and be able to return this knowledge back in to the Zend Framework.
And who is working on it?
Currently, the team has 3 members, which go by the nicks of DASPRiD, Freeaqingme and Remi_Woler. This project is not backed, endorsed, sponsored, supported, or otherwise mentioned by Zend Technologies Ltd. Therefor, to use this project, you will have to change your PHP code a bit. The Zend_ namespace prefix is reserved for Zend endorsed projects only, so we are not allowed to use the same prefix. Instead, the Ethanica_ prefix is used. A one time change would make up for this, although we do not recommend to use the project in any production site at the time of writing (Oct 27th, 2008). The project is about a week old, and only provides 2 of the 1323 classes provided by the Zend Framework.
Now what?
If you want to contribute, in any way, feel free to visit the projects IRC channel in #ethanica on FreeNode. If you just want to stay tuned to the projects process, check back in a couple of weeks to find a full featured site, including an RSS feed, to stay fully tuned with all updates. For now, feel free to check out a very preliminary version from SVN at svn.ethanica.com, or just remember the name, and check back in a couple of weeks.
News :
The Ethanica project has been ignited!