Everyone has their own set of tools. As a PHP developer, one of my favorites is a Rapid Application Development framework called “Nooku”. In the words of the development group: “Nooku is more of a web development toolkit than a framework”.

In case you are not familiar with it, have a look. It’s an open source project that makes heavy use of industry accepted design patterns to produce highly componentized applications that are easily extensible and reusable (initially created by one of the lead Joomla! developers). Out of the box, Nooku gives you a great deal to help get projects off the ground faster. A small, but strong sample:

• A default implementation of MVC where all you need to do is write the layout (this is what hooked me) HMVC availability right away
• Support for different output formats like JSON and XML for all your data (i.e., expose your API in minutes) Default administrative and front-end implementations
• At the heart of Nooku is the “Composition over Inheritance” design principle (in fact, it’s the first concept on the Nooku introductory page). In one line: you should aim to compose (or add up) the functionality of multiple objects to create some sort of composite object, rather than relying on subclassing.

Read the rest @ Engineering Internals of a RAD Framework... as a PHP Developer on the TopTal blog