Paragon

FAQs

What is Paragon?
What is it useful for?
What features does it have?
Who is likely to benefit from it?
What are the development plans for it?
How much is it?
Can I help in any way?
How can I get support or assistance?
How can I contact the Paragon development team?
How do I file a bug report or security advisory?
How can I get a copy of Paragon?
Is there any documentation I can read regarding Paragon?
How can I stay up to date on the Paragons' development?

What is Paragon?

Paragon is a powerful, robust and flexible fast application development framework written in PHP and completely open-sourced. It contains a structured library of extensible components used for modelling real world objects and processes.

It is a true 3-tier system defining an abstraction between the presentation, business logic and data access layers. It provides a set of extensible API's for modelling custom business logic and employs a simplified Model-View-Controller design paradigm.

Paragon provides extensible APIs for

flexible graphical user interface display that is multi-lingual and mark-up agnostic
easy to use relational database connection and communication for relational databases supported by PHP (currently Postgresql and MySql are supported).
simple SMTP/MIME message generation using Internet or Unix domain sockets
flexible authentication and authorisation of HTTP(s) requests.
configurable error handling
configurable file uploading via HTTP(s)

What is it useful for?

Paragon has been specifically designed to provide developers with an extensible framework of components from which custom data-driven web applications can be rapidly developed.

It provides a set of fully functional, yet extensible components for handling GUI display (i.e. presentation layer) and database connection and communication (i.e. data access layer). These components are abstracted from a set of flexible and extensible API's used to model the custom business logic required by any web application.

Using the extensible API's, developers can define the data and processes requirements of an application and then build the custom objects required to meet the applications' requirements.

The typical applications that Paragon can be used to create are:

user management with subscription
content management systems
product catalogue/shopping cart
threaded multi-view bulletin board systems
intranet systems
extranets systems
customer relations management systems

Paragon will also benefit the prototyping of very complex applications as a proof of concept. For example, a large scale application can make use of PHPs' interpreted language flexibility and Paragon's extensible framework to rapidly and incrementally (i.e. employing the extreme programming methodology) design the applications architecture. Once the architecture is tested and finalised it can be ported to another strongly typed language more suitable to very large web applications (i.e. Java/C).

What features does it have?

The key features of Paragon are:

It is completely open sourced under the LGPL licence.
It provides a solid library of objects to perform common tasks aids in rapid application development (i.e. RAD).
It is a true 3-tier system, completely abstracting the database, presentation and business logic.
It provides a framework to model real world business processes and components as objects.
It uses a Model-View-Controller design pattern.
It is a modular system, with interface provided to "plug-in" any additional modules required by an application.
It has a simple command line configuration process that allows for a very easy set-up process on many servers.

Who is likely to benefit from it?

Paragon will primarily benefit web developers looking for a powerful, robust and flexible framework that is easy to use and open sourced.

It will lower the cost of web development project by

not requiring licence charges for use.
reducing the development time by through using existing APIs' and/or modules.
provide a flexible mechanism to deploy Paragon based systems up on many servers (i.e. testing, staging and production servers).
separating the responsibilities of designers and a developers via the presentation layer abstraction.

What are the development plans for it?

The Paragon team is hard at work testing, documenting and improving Paragon wherever possible.

Plans are under way to define the requirements to port Paragon to PHP5 and make use of the new object model.

Development has already begun on module APIs for

a product catalogue/shopping cart application (near beta release)
a content management system (finalising architectural design)

The Paragon team plans to develop additional components for

supporting the remaining database products available to PHP (i.e. Oracle, ODBC, SQLite, etc)
XML parsing
communication via the SOAP protocol
flexible image manipulation using GD2.

How much is it?

Paragon is freely available to the general public under the LGPL. You can freely download a copy from here.

The Paragon team would like to thank the sourceforge.net team for providing the great hosting and software.

Can I help in any way?

The easiest help you can provide is to try it out. If Paragon suits your requirements, then use it wherever possible. Second to this, spread the good the word about Paragon. The more exposure and use it gets, the more it will get improved.

If you would like to learn more about how to join the development, testing or documentation teams at Paragon, click here.

How can I get support or assistance?

You can get request support using our support forum here.

How do I contact the Paragon development team?

You can contact the Paragon team via the developers forum here.

How do I file a bug report or security advisory?

You can report bugs or security issues here. We will promptly take care of it.

How can I get a copy of Paragon?

You can get a copy of the latest Paragon files here.

Is there any documentation I can read regarding Paragon?

You can access all the Paragon documentation here.

How can I stay up to date on the Paragons' development?

You can stay up to date on all Paragon happenings by joining our mail lists here.