ISoC56

The ISLE Dragonfly Factory, whose first foundations were layed down in the late 1980s, has been significantly overhauled, and modernised into the ISLE AIT Framework. The original factory covered may programming languages, amongst which PHP. Support for PHP was not retained in the new AIT Framework as we had little demand for such support, doing most of our web developments in Crystal, Go, Java, JSP, and Objective C.

Since however we have booked projects for 2020-2021 which will require large PHP backend developments. Our in-house Agora and Tahtum frameworks which have stagnated since the end of the 2000s are no longer worth considering. Hence this project, an ΙSLE Summer of Code initiative which we intend to share with whoever finds our goals of interest.

In brief the goal of ISoC #56 is to assemble a PHP framework which facilitates the development of backend services which will primarily be driven through RESTful interfaces, GitHub Actions, and command line or batch automation. This framework is designed with three use cases in mind:

1. PWA backend

   In this use case the PHP framework targets the deployment, management, and update of progressive web applications which are intended to be essentially serverless, or, more precisely, capable of delivering their capabilities when offline or over poor internet connections.

2. Headless ERP

   We want to modernise the user experience of our SAMinfo ERP and provide dedicated clients for various desktop and mobile environments. While we retain Java for the core business rules, we wish to migrate away from JSP and use this new framework to provide the backend RESTful services.

   FWIW we are currently investigating Dart for mobile user interfaces, and have favoured Qt/Objective C over Electron for desktops and laptops.

3. Headless CMS

   We are in the early design stages of re-engineering a university web portal to integrate a multitude of content providers, both internal and external. The project aims significant simplification through the elimination of redundant software components and the installment of university-wide APIs at both the user-interface and data-provider levels. The PHP framework should also provide a well-defined stack and extensive documentation for content providers.