TYPO3.Flow

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  <title>Introduction</title>

  <para>FLOW3 is a PHP-based application framework. It is especially

  well-suited for enterprise-grade applications and explicitly supports

  Domain-Driven Design, a powerful software design philosophy. Convention over

  configuration, Test-Driven Development, Continuous Integration and an

  easy-to-read source code are other important principles we follow for the

  development of FLOW3.</para>

  <para>Although we created FLOW3 as the foundation for the TYPO3 Content

  Management System, its approach is general enough to be useful as a basis

  for any other PHP application. We're happy to share the FLOW3 framework with

  the whole PHP community and are looking forward to the hundreds of new

  features and enhancements contributed as packages by other enthusiastic

  developers. In fact most of the packages which will be developed for the

  TYPO3 CMS can be used in any other FLOW3-based application. In essence this

  reflects the vision of the TYPO3 project: "Inspiring People to

  Share".</para>

  <para>This reference describes all features of FLOW3 and provides you with

  in-depth information. If you'd like to get a feeling for FLOW3 and get

  started quickly, we suggest that you try out our Getting Started tutorial

  first.</para>

  <note>

    <para>Although we hope that the documentation is accurate and up to date,

    it probably misses some important sections or parts that are hard to

    understand. If you find errors or would like to help us improving the

    documentation, we're happy to hear from you on our mailing list!</para>

  </note>

  <section xml:id="flow3.introduction.overview">

    <title>Overview</title>

    <para>The FLOW3 framework is composed of the following submodules:</para>

    <itemizedlist>

      <listitem>

        <para>The <emphasis>FLOW3 Bootstrap</emphasis> takes care of

        configuring and initializing the whole framework.</para>

      </listitem>

      <listitem>

        <para>The <emphasis>Package</emphasis> Manager allows you to download,

        install, configure and uninstall packages.</para>

      </listitem>

      <listitem>

        <para>The <emphasis>Object</emphasis> Manager is in charge of

        building, caching and combining objects.</para>

      </listitem>

      <listitem>

        <para>The <emphasis>Configuration</emphasis> framework reads and

        cascades various kinds of configuration from different sources and

        provides access to it.</para>

      </listitem>

      <listitem>

        <para>The <emphasis>Resource</emphasis> module contains functions for

        publishing, caching, securing and retrieving resources.</para>

      </listitem>

      <listitem>

        <para>The <emphasis>MVC</emphasis> framework takes care of requests

        and responses and provides you with a powerful, easy-to use

        Model-View-Controller implementation.</para>

      </listitem>

      <listitem>

        <para>The <emphasis>Cache</emphasis> framework provides different

        kinds of caches with can be combined with a selection of cache

        backends.</para>

      </listitem>

      <listitem>

        <para>The <emphasis>Error</emphasis> module handles errors and

        exceptions and provides utility classes for this purpose.</para>

      </listitem>

      <listitem>

        <para>The <emphasis>Log</emphasis> module provides simple but powerful

        means to log any kind of event or signal into different types of

        backends.</para>

      </listitem>

      <listitem>

        <para>The <emphasis>Signal Slot</emphasis> module implements the

        event-driven concept of signals and slots through AOP aspects.</para>

      </listitem>

      <listitem>

        <para>The <emphasis>Validation</emphasis> module provides a validation

        and filtering framework with built-in rules as well as support for

        custom validation of any object.</para>

      </listitem>

      <listitem>

        <para>The <emphasis>Property</emphasis> module implements the concept

        of property editors and is used for setting and retrieving object

        properties.</para>

      </listitem>

      <listitem>

        <para>The <emphasis>Reflection</emphasis> API complements PHP's

        built-in reflection support by advanced annotation handling and a

        cached reflection service.</para>

      </listitem>

      <listitem>

        <para>The <emphasis>AOP</emphasis> framework enables you to use the

        powerful techniques of <firstterm>Aspect Oriented

        Programming</firstterm>.</para>

      </listitem>

      <listitem>

        <para>The <emphasis>Persistence</emphasis> module allows you to

        transparently persist your objects following principles of

        <emphasis>Domain Driven Design</emphasis>.</para>

      </listitem>

      <listitem>

        <para>The <emphasis>Security</emphasis> framework enforces security

        policies and provides an API for managing those.</para>

      </listitem>

      <listitem>

        <para>The <emphasis>Session</emphasis> framework takes care of session

        handling and storing session information in different backends</para>

      </listitem>

      <listitem>

        <para>The <emphasis>Locale</emphasis> service manages languages and

        other regional settings and makes them accessible to other packages

        and FLOW3 sub packages.</para>

      </listitem>

      <listitem>

        <para>The <emphasis>Utility</emphasis> module is a library of useful

        general-purpose functions for file handling, algorithms, environment

        abstraction and more.</para>

      </listitem>

    </itemizedlist>

    <para>If you are overwhelmed by the amount of information in this

    reference, just keep in mind that you don't need to know all of it to

    write your own FLOW3 packages. You can always come back and look up a

    specific topic once you need to know about it - that's what references are

    for. But even if you don't need to know everything, we recommend that you

    get familiar with the concepts of each module and read the whole manual.

    This way you make sure that you don't miss any of the great features FLOW3

    provides and hopefully feel inspired to produce clean and

    easy-maintainable code.</para>

    <tip>

      <para>A strong coffee helps most people over even the longest

      documentation.</para>

    </tip>

  </section>

</chapter>