General

I'm very proud to be able to announce version 0.1 of phpSATk to you. I've been developing on it for over a year right now and would really like to hear what other people do think about it.

phpSATk is built to be a toolkit for building extensible and maintainable applications which perform common system and network administrative tasks. My main intent for building these applications is to be able to delegate common tasks in my network to non-technical people while allowing for more generic managment applications giving me full insight to my system - both kinds of applications sharing as much code as possible. This toolkit is meant to take as much of the common work (buiding views, forms, ...) from the developer and provide interfaces to common services. One of the core components of it is what I call XDOs (eXtensible data objects) which provide a object oriented abstracted interface to whatever you like to - having some very useful and unique features.

The main goal of this release is to present you the concepts and capabilities of phpSATk, do not consider it a full-blown product or stable - it isn't as I'm dependent on you feedback, ideas and criticism to make it that. The design and APIs are subject to change in the feature.



The roadmap to 0.1 was
- Core
- Request handling/basic controllers
- Authentication and Authorization
- Templates
- eXtensible DataObjects and DataSets
- Form generation
and I think I got these things pretty well. There's quite a lot "real" documentation missing but I hope that I can compensate for this by providing personal support for interested people, prefered ways are to contact me via the mailing list or on IRC, directions can be found here.

Help is always wanted - if you are willing to contribute fell free to contact me.

This release includes some sample applications (which are usable but not feature-complete):
- authApp, a tool for managing phpSATk internal users, roles and access control lists
- jobServer, a tool for managing phpSATk's background job facilities
- CA, a small application for managing your X.509 PKI (revocation list support requires a PHP patch - here)
- krbAdmin, a small application for managing kerberos principals and policies (requires a PHP extension - here)

Download:
phpsatk-0.1.tar.bz2 (MD5: 1febf1fa249631451d27517acb923741)
phpsatk-0.1.tar.gz (MD5: 809a6314e9763e9843335498dcd19734)
phpsatk-0.1.zip (MD5: 0b68a6c0cfcf7eef0baa1be5f7def2de)

For the majority that doesn't know what's this all about: phpSATk is intended to be a Framework (and some kind of application server) helping network/system administrators to write small (or even larger) management applications. In my opinion using standard techniques this is a very unproductive task making you spend a huge amount of time on things like form processing (if done securely and user friendly) which do not add to the application's core functionality. phpSATk tries to help you with that. Also it tries to force and support you in making your applications extensible and interoperable. (more to come...)

There are not yet any real application built based on phpSATk and you're also not adviced to do so, because the API is not stable yet.

Features include (yet) ...