What is Li3?

"One of L.I.'s finest, and this is 'MY LIFE', Which is filled with bad minutes and good hours, And, good months and bad years and with my peers" - Posdonus, De La Soul

Li3 (formerly known as Lithium) is a PHP web framework.

A framework is a bunch of gubbins that allows you to make stuff.

OK, that wasn't very scientific, was it? I'll try again!

A web framework is some software that allows you to build your web applications in a structured, consistent manner. A framework generally has a "core" that you don't modify; rather you write extensions and plugins "on top of" the framework. It stacks up like this:

|==============================|
| Your application code        |
|==============================|
| Framework                    |
|==============================|
| Programming language runtime |
|==============================|
| Operating system             |
|==============================|

Examples of frameworks include Java's Spring, Ruby's Rails, and Python's Django. In PHP, we have Symfony2, Silex, Slim, F3 and many others. Li3 is a framework that, once I tried it, I was hooked - it has a no-nonsense style, it's not super-heavyweight but neither is it Michael Mouse, esquire - it's well written, well tested and it just seems to largely MAKE SENSE to me! Here's Li3 in a "stack"

|==============================|
| Your application code        |
|==============================|
| Li3                          |
|==============================|
| PHP runtime (e.g. PHP/fpm)   |
|==============================|
| Linux, Unix, Windows, OSX    |
|==============================|

Li3, like many frameworks, comes with a lot of stuff "out of the box" to allow you to get up and running quite quickly. We'll cover a lot of those features as we go. It's going to be fun!