What is Nifty?

Nifty is two things really; it’s a CMS I wrote for a few clients, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about. Most importantly, Nifty is a PHP framework for web application development which grew out of several years of PHP hacking and CMS development.

There are many other great PHP frameworks out there. At one point, I tried the Zend framework, for instance, but I grew tired of deploying thousands of files with my application. The system library for Nifty weighs in at about 60 files, about 205 kb. Small and sweet.

At the same time, it’s designed to make most tedious stuff as short and efficient as possible.

• Model-View-Controller pattern
• Included template engine (based on PHP native templates)
• Object databas mapping and persistence
• Page caching
• Call routing and friendly URL rewriting
• Complete Object-Oriented design
• Short and sweet $Request, $Response, $Session and $Config objects
• Authentication layer
• Form classes for dynamically constructing forms and parsing postback data
• Utility functions for RSS feeds, Excel-style DateTime handling, Password checking etc.

It’s grown to be quite mature, and several intranet and external web applications have been built on top of it.

Of course, once you get into “frameworking”, there’s no end to the amount of features you’d want built in, but Nifty is designed to cover the essentials in a stylish and powerful way.

Nifty Framework is also open source, released under Sun’s Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).