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I'm considering using the Agile Toolkit, ATK4 to upgrade a number of web projects that I'm working on. I really like the idea/paradigm that the Agile Toolkit presents, but I'm worried about documentation.

The agile website's documentation is sparse, in broken English, and seems to 'paraphrase' the symfony documentation.

The agile toolkit alleges to have been in development/production since 1999, yet there are only a handful of StackOverflow.com posts regarding agile, and next to nothing comes up in Google searches...

In short is it worth spending time learning the Agile toolkit, or would my time be better spent on a framework that has more of an active support community? I've tried a few other frameworks, but ATK's implementation really stands out...

Bennett
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    http://new.agiletoolkit.org/learn has more docs. Community is small, we're looking for funding to up-scale it all. It's been named "amodules" before 2008. – romaninsh Jul 21 '11 at 08:41
  • i ran through the docs yesterday, they were alright. The project is significantly more appealing to me than the other frameworks I've tried to use though, which made me decide to work with it. Many of my initial reservations were a result of me over thinking the toolkit. – Bennett Jul 22 '11 at 00:09
  • Just an update: working on a book http://agiletoolkit.org/book.pdf – romaninsh Dec 12 '12 at 16:57

3 Answers3

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Initially ATK was born as an internal tool from Agile Technologies (.ie) so that has been conceived in 1999 but it was recently launched as dual licensed framework. That's why it lacks some documentation and has not a huge community nor appears Googling.

I was amazed at first sight by its working way proposal so that I engaged it. The documentation has been already improved and over the time it will keep getting better and community will grow. I had the chance to get in touch with the lead developer and trust me, it will get better and better.

Even, as an example all the ATK4's site is developed with the toolkit and the code is short and pretty easy to read.

Good luck!

fernandojmartin
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ATK4 does have many examples, and code is concise and clear. It accomplishes the goal of wrapping server-side and client-side into one comprehensive framework via php. Plus it looks nice. It does appear that documentation is improving.

Eric Schwartz
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Yep - agree with what the others are saying - Romans is doing a great job of getting the documentation updated. I started writing an application in straight php but realised i was going to need to use jquery to get a nice, cross browser compatible front end and wanted a php framework that would support that.

I looked at Yii, Cake and CodeIgniter but ATK4 really seems to do what i wanted. Like anything, it takes a bit of getting used to and i'm still relatively new to both php and ATK4 but i've rewritten what i already had for my application in the framework and the code is so clean - all the html and css are separate and the page code is really compact. The integration with Jquery is great and i've just written a plugin that i needed to get jqplot working for nice looking graphs.

Trevor North
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  • ATK4 achieves a lot, it's got a great design. I'd be interested to know about you JavaScript experiences with it. I didn't end up wrapping my head around exactly how the JS worked. This may be because I have very extensive JS needs. – Bennett Sep 15 '11 at 07:03
  • Hey @Bennet, I have uploaded this video, which answers JS question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Am3MNkQF4P8&feature=related – romaninsh Sep 15 '11 at 15:14
  • To be burtally honest, it was a bit like learning to ride a bicycle only without the pavement :). But just like riding a bicycle, once you get the hang of it, everything seems so simple. i persevered because i can see the potential in the framework and also because Romans has been very supportive in answering questions and providing feedback and examples for which i am very grateful. – Trevor North Sep 17 '11 at 01:53