Bones

In this book, we are going to build a very lightweight framework called Bones to run our application. You will probably wonder to yourself why are we building another framework? It's a valid question! There are tons of PHP frameworks out there such as: Zend framework, Cake, Symfony, and so on. These are all powerful frameworks, but they also have a steep learning curve, and it would be impossible to touch on each of them in this book. Instead, we'll create an extremely light PHP framework that will help simplify our development but won't have a lot of other bells and whistles. By building this framework, you'll have a greater understanding of HTTP methods and how to build light applications from the ground up. Once you've developed this application using Bones, it should be easy for you to apply your knowledge to another framework, because we'll be using some pretty standard processes.

If you run into any problems through this chapter or are eager to see the finished product, then you can access the full Bones framework on GitHub: https://github.com/timjuravich/bones. I'll also cover an easy way for you to grab all of this code at the end of this chapter.

Let's get started by setting up our project.