About Agile Toolkit

Agile Toolkit is a PHP5 toolkit developed by Agile Technologies Ltd. Our mission is to provide simple and powerful platform for new and experienced web developers. We target commercial and open-source Web projects and appreciate the importance of open source and commercial software commercial php, php developer, php jobs

Agile Toolkit is a powerful web development framework. Inspired by GUI Applications development, Widget Objects in Agile Toolkit work seamlessly with jQuery. Developer can focus on developing Business logic and User Interface logic in pure high-level PHP code.

Page-based frameworks (Symfony, Code Igniter, CakePHP, Django, Ruby on Rails etc) do not attempt to abstract underlying technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, AJAX, SQL). As a consequence, a web developer needs to be familiar with all of these technologies, be responsible for cross-browser compatibility and graceful degradation. More importantly, these frameworks do very little to help you implement seamless AJAX communication and fluid interaction between front-end and back-end. You as a developer would need to create Client-Server interaction interface.

Pure JavaScript frameworks could put even more stress on user interface development introducing new complications, potential security flaws, faults and inconsistencies. Some other GUI-inspired frameworks makes your web application look too much like a desktop application. Agile Toolkit provides a perfect balance of simplicity, efficiency and integrated development.

Agile Toolkit delivers simplicity by dealing with complexities, not ignoring them.

PHP landscape is insanely fragmented and focused towards "Designers" who have little or no programming skills. This explains popularity of platforms such as Wordpress and Drupal. Many great developers have already left PHP in search for a decent development platform. For the rest of us - programmers - Agile Toolkit offers an elegant and simple approach to Web Development

Agile Toolkit is Clean

Footprint of Agile Toolkit is incredibly small. This is achieved by weeding out non-essential functionality and making it available as add-on. Install and use only what you need.

Agile Toolkit is Powerful

Functionality of Agile Toolkit surpasses other PHP frameworks simply because it offers developers a great User interface fully integrated with jQuery on the client side and Model structure on the backend.

Agile Toolkit is Efficient

Most of the tasks you would think of can be developed in Agile Toolkit faster. The initial learning might take a while, but once you understand Agile Toolkit, you will be unstoppable and would never go back.

Agile Toolkit is Innovative

Usually PHP frameworks offer you little innovation. Agile Toolkit does what you thought is impossible. You learn more about web development from Agile Toolkit screen-casts than from any other tutorial.

Agile Toolkit is Expanding

Agile Toolkit has a great potential for extensions. You would need to be a developer to take advantage, but once you know how to program, extensions are powerful, simple and easy to use.

Agile Toolkit is about You

Regardless of what kind of web software you are making, Agile Toolkit can adopt and help you compile set of your own tools, extensions, templates, views or models. Make your own toolkit.

What types of web applications are most suitable to be developed with Agile Toolkit?

You will get the most benefit from writing your heavyily data-interactive system or backend in Agile Toolkit. Separation of business logic and UI will help you avoid going into PLSQL or JSON parsing with JavaScript.

Agile Toolkit is perfect for web development with Agile approach. You can get results very quickly and then tweak interface, layouts, page structure, models throughout further iterations.

Building internet startups (SaaS) in Agile Toolkit is very efficient. When budget is limited, you need to get the job done and you want someone else to worry about technical details, such as form submission techniques. Agile Toolkit allows to add security measures, testing or more abstraction anytime down the road. You won't have to worry about code hacks or slow performance and if you keep up the good practices of Agile Toolkit.

Do you have idea for Open-Source project? How about a decent postfix-mysql database web interface? Agile Toolkit is a perfect match. Agile Toolkit is open-source, comes with awesomely looking UI and will help you interact with your database in a very advanced and secure way.

Developing CMS on Agile Toolkit is easy. There are all the components for you, all you need to do is organise them in a reasonable business manner to fit your client and you'll get highly-customized, fast, simple-looking and fool-proof backend and perfectly skinned frontend with no traces of Agile Toolkit.

Mini FAQ

What exactly is Agile Toolkit? Is it a framework?

Agile Toolkit is a Collection of closely-coupled PHP5-based Object-Oriented classes for generation of rich HTML5-based web apps, organised into a modern framework and bundled with a great looking templates, CSS-based layouts and thin jQuery based client-side API.

In simple terms - it gives you everything to keep your focused on your goals. It educates you how to develop properly. It makes any stuff you develop look great. When you become good with Agile Toolkit, you can re-implement the stuff you don't like, re-use stuff you like or build new stuff on top of existing.

If you are familiar with JavaScript frameworks, the Agile Toolkit is similar in concept and design to jQuery and jQuery UI, but does it server-side.

Is it a new framework?

Agile Toolkit was known previously as AModules and traces it's history to 1999. Each major release have been a major rewrite, although some of the code was just cleaned up and ported. Throughout it's history the toolkit have powered over 300 commercial projects. In 2010 it was decided to release Agile Toolkit publicly under open-source and commercial licenses

Agile Toolkit uses many of the concepts found in other frameworks, although they are implemented independently, often differently. Some features pre-dates appearance of their analogues in other frameworks. See how Agile Toolkit has evolved on Agile Toolkit Timeline

Why is it called Agile?

Agile Toolkit is perfect when it comes to Web Development using Agile Approach. Some of the principles behind Agile Methodology are also principles behind design of Agile Toolkit such as:

I am beginner, will I understand it?

Yes. The core concept of Agile Toolkit is really simple. We have shown project code to people who have no development experience and they admit it's very clear and self-explanatory.

To start with Agile Toolkit you will need to go through Introduction and Tutorial. Afterwards you can simply mash-up your application from blocks.

Developing simple website with Agile Toolkit is certainly easier than doing it in plain PHP.

I am hardcore developer / hacker. Will it restrict me?

No. Agile Toolkit is based on several powerful concepts (such as abstraction) often used by senior developers. Agile Toolkit attempts to be very elegant and achieve a lot of functionality through a small amount of "clever" code.

As a power user, you will be able to take advantage of re-usability and customization to avoid any restrictions.

Can I make website with ATK? Is it a CMS?

Yes. You need to know very little from PHP to use Agile Toolkit. Agile Toolkit is well suited for CMS-based sites with custom logic and interactive behavior.

Our website for Agile Technologies similarly uses Agile Toolkit, but there the content is stored in MySQL database and is editable on-line, which makes it a proper CMS system.

Unless you want to make a quick website for your client within 1 day time, Agile Toolkit will give you much greater flexibility and control over content, dynamic interaction and web2.0 of your website.

Learn how to build a really simple website in Agile Toolkit

Why another PHP framework?

Agile Toolkit has the following goals:

  1. Implement Object-Oriented user interface. Let developers focus on the logic and take care of presentation.
  2. Be suitable for business applications. Target PHP professionals who want result and stability.
  3. Make it simple to implement things but DONT implement them all. Keep things OUT from framework core.
  4. Agile Toolkit is ALWAYS faster development. Even for small things.
  5. Make code simple and very easy to drill down into the code. Great for learning. Once you understand Agile Toolkit, you can understand any app.
  6. Be insanely extensible, even more extensible than that for add-on authors. Remain intuitive and simple for developer.
  7. Designed to absorb experience. Double form submits? Deployment ad SQL migration? Model-level field-access restriction? Built-in strong encryption or oAuth? Agile Toolkit does them all in a very transparent way.
How Agile Toolkit approach to User Interface compares with other UI frameworks?

We have found that other frameworks often have one of the following 3 disadvantages: