Development status Active | Written in C, PHP | |
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Developer(s) Andres Gutierrez and others Initial release November 14, 2012 (2012-11-14) Stable release 3.0.3 / 24 December 2016; 3 months ago (2016-12-24) Platform Unix, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows | ||
Phalcon is a high-performance PHP web framework based on the model–view–controller (MVC) pattern. Originally released in 2012, it is an open-source framework licensed under the terms of the BSD License.
Unlike most PHP frameworks, Phalcon is implemented as a web server extension written in Zephir and C, aiming to boost execution speed, reduce resource usage, and handle more HTTP requests per second than comparable frameworks written primarily in PHP. One drawback of this approach is that root/administrative access is required on the server to install Phalcon by building a custom binary or using a precompiled one.
History
Phalcon was created by Andrés Gutiérrez and collaborators looking for a new approach to traditional web application frameworks written in PHP. The original intention was to use "Spark" as the name, but the combination of words "PHP" and "Falcon" (which is one of fastest animals) ended as the name of the framework. Phalcon's initial release was made available on November 14, 2012.
Phalcon 0.3.5 includes an ORM written in C, MVC components, and cache components. This release was followed by the Phalcon 0.5.0 that brought a high-level dialect of SQL called PHQL, and Phalcon 0.6.0 that introduced Volt, a template engine similar to Jinja. Phalcon 1.0 was released on March 21, 2013. with Phalcon 1.3 being the last minor release in that series. Phalcon 2.0 saw most of the project ported from C to Zephir.
Phalcon 3.0.0 was released on 29 July 2016, this major release includes support for PHP 7 as well as being Phalcon's first LTS (Long Term Support) release. Phalcon also adopted SemVer for their next releases versioning.