Adopting MVC, Model-View-Controller, to create a PHP programming framework always looks straight-forward. It is a successful design pattern (a set of general rules regulating the program design and implementation process to achieve a programming task). Again, the design of PHP language encourages MVC pattern — look at the documents at http://www.zend.com/php5/zend-engine2.php for further details. So, we adopt MVC – it is as simple as that.

RBAC stands for Role-Based Access Control. The basic concept of the scheme is that it separates user’s attributes (roles) and user’s action of the system (actions/methods). In the whole process, the attributes are independently bound to a set of privileges of the system or application.

UML Design:
There are two excellent freewares:Dia: http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/This program helps in drawing class diagrams and has an extension to convert the class diagram into PHP code. However, the drawing functionality of this tool is very much limited to class diagrams.
The other is AgroUML: http://argouml.tigris.org/

Database Design and Administration:
DB Designer: http://www.fabforce.net/dbdesigner4/
This tool is indispensable for database modeling and maintenance. The database structure and schema can be designed and exported into MySQL DB. The existing database tables can be imported into this tool too. The saving format is XML.
Other is the very popular PHPMyAdmin. The latest version offers many good features like stability in import and export functions and documentation and indexing utilities.
MySQL AB also offers an utility for MySQL database administration; but it’s not stable as it’s an ALPHA release. The features looks promising however!

Unit Testing in PHP:
http://phpunit.sourceforge.net/
Another hyperlink provides comprehensive details on the unit testing with PHP source code: Simple Test

Documentation:
PHP Documentator: http://www.phpdoc.org/
This tool provides documentation tool for PHP source codes. This is also used to document Pear classes.
A browser framework called PHPOBrowser (http://gogogadgetscott.info/computers/scripts/phpob.php) is used to scan the PHP classes and other source code in an aplication.

Editors:
There is studio application to develop large PHP applications. The leading one among them is Zend studio. Apart from this, there are good text editors like Crimson Editor (http://www.crimsoneditor.com/) and Vim - a GUI variant of most powerful text editor (http://www.vim.org/).

Ion Cube PHP Accelerator: http://www.php-accelerator.co.uk/
This tool is used for improving performance of PHP systems.

Bug Tracking: Mantis (http://www.mantisbt.org/)

Job Scheduler: http://www.thedemosite.co.uk/phpjobscheduler/
Cron job handler through PHP Script

NOTE: The software, documentation for each of the above is available on the corresponding Web site.

World Wide Web pertains to the hyper-world of electronic and optical communications where a set of commonly accepted protocols regulate the data transfer and interpretation. As of any other way of communications, the user perspective inspires the technological innovations, and similarly, the technical advancements greatly influence the user behaviour. This Web site makes effort to enact the frontier threads of this evolving field to provide the perspective of usability and innovations.

A new set of recommendations have been proposed to make the PHP application development quicker. User authentications and security issues have been taken into account.

The framework has been simplified further if you compare with the previous version:

• Recommended folder structure has been made simpler. The decision has been made looking at the significant effort required for the programmer to pick different files from different directories. This will help programmer pick the files quickly for editing. It will improve the speed of development.
• Earlier recommendations for structured code in the Model and View have been withdrawn. Instead, the new recommendations insist upon creating object-oriented code by employing two classes – model.cls.php and view.cls.php
• The new recommendations propose to construct the content of HTTP Response through the View object rather than using “include” statements for HTML files within the Controller file.
  The current proposal insists on using DB class through inheritance from the Model class.

Now we are building a sample application (in the line of current recommendations) demonstrating the power and flexibility of the framework.