PRADO is a component-based and event-driven programming framework for developing Web applications in PHP 5. PRADO stands for PHP Rapid Application Development Object-oriented.
The following list is a short summary of the main features of PRADO:
- Reusability - Code following the PRADO component protocol are highly reusable. This benefits development teams in the long run as they can reuse their previous work and integrate other parties' work easily.
- Event-driven programming - End-user activities, such as clicking on a submit button, are captured as server events so that developers have better focus on dealing with user interactions.
- Team integration - Presentation and logic are separately stored. PRADO applications are themable.
- Powerful Web controls - PRADO comes with a set of powerful components dealing with Web user interfaces. Highly interactive Web pages can be created with a few lines of code. For example, using the datagrid component, one can quickly create a page presenting a data table which allows paging, sorting, editing, and deleting rows of the data.
- Strong database support - Since version 3.1, PRADO has been equipped with complete database support which is natively written and thus fits seemlessly with the rest part of the PRADO framework. According to the complexity of the business objects, one can choose to use the simple PDO-based data access, or the widely known active record, or the complete business object mapping scheme SqlMap.
- Seamless AJAX support - Using AJAX in PRADO has never been easier with its innovative active controls introduced since version 3.1. You can easily write an AJAX-enabled application without writing a single line of javascript code. In fact, using active controls is not much different from using the regular non-AJAX enabled Web controls.
- I18N and L10N support - PRADO includes complete support for building applications with multiple languages and locales.
- XHTML compliance - Web pages generated by PRADO are XHTML-compliant.
- Accommodation of existing work - PRADO is a generic framework with focus on the presentational layer. It does not exclude developers from using most existing class libraries or toolkits. For example, one can AdoDB or Creole to deal with DB in his PRADO application.
- Other features - Powerful error/exception handling and message logging; generic caching and selective output caching; customizable and localizable error handling; extensible authentication and authorization; security measures such as cross-site script (CSS) prevention, cookie protection, etc.
