Bronson is a rapid deployment framework for LAMP enabling buildling of scaleable highly customized robust membership, content, community and media sites.
Application frameworks are a dime a dozen today. What we realized differentiates them are four key factors:
Development should be easy. This means that from the time of conception of a desired functionality to the time of deployment should be as low as possible while retaining the other core values of scalability, maintainability and customizability. Time is reduced by familiarity of the task at hand. As a result, a framework which offloads core development issues not directly related to business purposes but necessary for their facilitation is of the greatest general-purpose value. For instance, you wouldn't be developing a webserver capable of sustaining 10000 simultaneous sessions, why would you want to to develop a templating system that can? At the same time, using such a system is critical for the success of a serious internet effort. So our system is built around taking the painful parts of development out of the process and keeping deployment-time development to a minimum - actually executing web pages. And making key development decisions out of familiar tasks of writing simple HTML and XML and industry standard PHP.
A software product needs to "really" scale smoothly. In a multi-tier application, this means taking care to ensure that each piece is able to deliver as promised, every time, and under every circumstance. It means having effecient data-access objects, and making those easy to use for template designers so that the tendency to cut corners during development is obviated. So making it easier to use pre-built well-tested components than writing custom components at deployment time is critical to producing a long-term scaleable product.
Software needs to help you get your job done. Software that presents barriers instead of facilitating delivery is without value. So making complex tasks simple while retaining flexibility is the best way to simultaneously deliver success across a broad range of applications while retaining ease of use and scalability. Our core product is built with the ability to quickly deploy new data-models and interactions within the context of sustainable, scaleable development.
Sites change. If they don't change, they stagnate. Building the facility for change into the core architecture is critical to developing flexible systems that will outlast their ROI time. At the same time, these changes need to be easily facilitated by the underlying core engine. Lastly, facilitating a standards-based approach to development makes it possible for systems to outlive a single developer or developer team making initial investments worthwhile. Our core API is simple and powerful and promotes simultaneously standards-based programming and self-documenting feature-enhancements.