Oh! Nephtali!
Alright, so if you look up “Nephtali” on thinkbabynames.com, you see it listed as a variant of “Naftali.”
The boy’s name Naftali \n(a)-fta-li, naf-tali\ is of Hebrew origin, and its meaning is “struggling”. Biblical: a son of Jacob and one of the ancestors of the 12 tribes of Israel.
“Struggling.” Apt.
How many phone calls from Adam have I received in the last year that began, “With Nephtali, if you were to do [blah blah blah], which of these approaches would you like the best?”
Countless. Every other day is a conservative estimate, considering that many days, there were many phone calls.
The man has been obsessively working on this “Nephtali.” Yesterday, in our ritual Nephtali conversation, he said, “So old man, it’s time to post this to your blog.”
After so many versions and so much work on Adam’s part, it’s time to break the silence.
What is Nephtali?
Well, I’ll give you my take on it, but for the practical details (and a download), go to nephtaliproject.com.
Nephtali is a framework for the development of data-driven websites. It uses PHP 5 and is object-oriented. It’s flexible, extensible, and plays nicely with other frameworks, like the Pear and Zend frameworks. Because of how it handles data, developers will tend to write more secure Web apps. It separates the presentation from the programming logic well, so that it is easy to use a tool such as Dreamweaver without worrying about messing up the behind-the-scenes programming. And, the API was written with a continual drive to make it user-friendly for programmers, while maintaining a value on security.
My experience with Nephtali, thus far
I’ve played with a couple iterations of Nephtali, and once getting oriented, I found I like it. (Granted, I’m biased having had so many discussions with Adam about it.)
Compared to CakePHP, Nephtali is easier to use. For instance, in CakePHP, or other Model-View-Controller frameworks (e.g., Ruby on Rails), database models are abstracted and then calls in the app rely on those abstractions. While there is a great benefit to this, I’ve found the abstractions themselves to be problematic. Nephtali can provide abstraction to fairly simple database actions (standard CRUD operations), but, gosh darn it, I like being able to jump in and write SQL. The reality for me as a developer is that database model abstraction causes me more grief than they are worth. Abstraction can slow me down, especially when the queries and relationships get tricky. Now, one of the big benefits to abstraction is that it can promote the DRY principle. Nephtali provides well for that, through implementing sub-classes, and I still have the direct, easy line to thinking about and working with the data in SQL.
The future of Nephtali
I could go on, but the proof for Nephtali will be in how many sites it is eventually used on, and how many other developers get their heads into it.
So, developers, check out Nephtali. And if you have questions or suggestions, do not hesitate to dialogue with Adam about it. And tell him to post a screen-cast of building a basic app with Nephtali.
For now, I’m going to see if I can get Adam to smash a bottle of champagne over his development box in honor of this release. Congrats, Adam!