README

Helium is a framework that is addressing two problems:

A) Development for startups involves rapid prototyping and MVPs in very short time periods to deliver production-ready solutions within a week to a month. If done incorrectly, it will create very high technical debt and make a business harder to scale.

B) A lot of development has become cookie-cutter with frameworks forcing you to abide by their rules that may not fit your development sprints. Coding is the ability to be creative and explore as one builds, and the developer should tell the framework how to work, not the other way around.

In response, I wanted to develop a solution with enough structure to make code easy to maintain, flexibility to respond to crazy demands quickly while allowing the freedom and creativity to do things your way. All these elements are competing interests.

Who Is This Framework For:

If you want to install a few packages to create a product quickly in a cookie cutter approach, this framework is NOT for you. Helium (He2MVC) is a minimalist framework that focuses on giving the developer a few guidelines and the freedom to explore and "innovate" (for better or for worse). This means it is your choice if you want to use Factories, Facades, Dependency Injection or whichever approach you like.

This Framework Is For Developers Who:

• Developers that want more control over their architecture and design pattern choices
• Developers that learn rules and conventions, only to break them
• Developers that want sites to load in 100ms to 500ms without cache(my record is 93ms)
• Developers that like to try new technologies and want to explore
• Developers that are bored of doing what everyone else does
• Developers that want to develop quickly with almost no safety nets
• Developers that like Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball Super or Dragon Ball TFS Abridged
• Developers with a sense of humor

Getting Started

To get started, please head over the Boilerplate. This is a base site accompanied with a how-to guide to get you going: https://github.com/Helium-MVC/Boilerplate

Educational Material

Understanding Helium

Helium comes with a lot of educational material to help developers get started quickly and to explore different ways of solving problems. In addition to these docs, you can reference:

• The Blog: https://medium.com/helium-mvc
• Functional Examples: https://github.com/Helium-MVC/Examples
• Online Documentation: https://medium.com/helium-mvc

Understanding ProdigyView

Helium is a fully functional framework that is only 7 files. How is that possible? A lot of what Helium builds upon is a PHP Toolkit called ProdigyView. ProdigyView does not have a structure but provides tools to make anything.

• Examples: https://github.com/ProdigyView-Toolkit/examples
• Documentation: https://prodigyview-toolkit.github.io/docs/
• Well Documented Code: https://github.com/ProdigyView-Toolkit/prodigyview

PHP 8.5 Compatibility

Helium's public surface is intentionally small: routing maps URLs to controllers/actions/views, and models delegate storage work to ProdigyView's database facade. PHP runtime upgrades should therefore preserve controller method names, view naming conventions, model virtual schema behavior, and the ProdigyView adapter/filter/observer extension points that production applications may already override.

Use the ProdigyView Docker test matrix when validating Helium against PHP 8.5. That matrix covers the database types Helium models can target through the shared facade: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and SQLite.

To run Helium's own MVC regression suite with the local ProdigyView checkout, use the PHP image built by ProdigyView:

docker run --rm \
  -v /path/to/MVC:/workspace \
  -w /workspace/Helium \
  prodigyview-php vendor/bin/phpunit -c tests/phpunit.xml tests

The suite covers registry lookups, controller defaults and redirects, router dispatch and error fallbacks, template rendering and helpers, and model validation/schema persistence through SQLite. For full database confidence, run the ProdigyView Docker matrix immediately after the Helium suite because Helium models delegate database operations to ProdigyView's facade.

Development Principles

For hardcore developers that focus on IoC, S.O.L.I.D and other principles, this section is for you. As you get started with Helium, it is good to understand some of the principles behind the framework.

1. A New Approach To Inversion of Control
2. Programming Principles For Early Stage Startups
3. How Helium and ProdigyView Is Designed For Startups
4. Debunking The Myth Of Static Classes, Methods and Variables

Help Developing Helium

We are looking for contributors! Up to this point, Helium has been a solo project developed over many sites. Any developers looking to contribute to the framework, their help will be greatly appreciated.