Last Sunday I had a spur of inspiration and decided to start over. With a slightly different vision, a better understanding of MVC and experience gained with the project I managed to finish it the same day. The result is about 150kB of code including documentation.

If you’re unfamiliar with the model-view-controller approach to programming Swiftlet might be a good starting point. The code is quite simple and hopefully the documentation makes the concept understandable.

Source code

Swiftlet on GitHub

Swiftlet is released under the GNU Public License.

One thing I struggled with was applying multiple transformations to an element. When rotating an object the coordinate plane rotates with it which means dragging no longer works as one might expect (e.g. right becomes up). Raphaël’s creator Dmitri Baranovskiy indicated this is the correct behavior.

I worked out a solution and released it as a plugin. It supports snap-to-grid dragging, scaling and rotating and handles sets. Like Raphaël itself, the plugin is licensed under the MIT license.

Source code

Raphaël.FreeTransform on GitHub

Demo

elbertf.com/raphael/free_transform/

See also…

These are a couple of other plugins I created recently.

Raphaël.JSON

Serialize Raphaël elements and back.

Raphaël.Export

Cross-browser solution to export Raphaël elements to SVG, works in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8. Can be used to convert Raphaël drawings to PNG or PDF server-side using ImageMagick or Batik.

Version 1.1 comes with a few new plugins that bring CMS-like features to Swiftlet. See the changelog for the full list of changes.

The documentation has also been updated and can now be found at swiftlet.org/docs. If you need support or have any requests, feel free to start a thread at swiftlet.org/community.

I’ve already begun working on Swiftlet 1.1 which is now in Alpha (unstable and not suited for live environments).

I released it under GPL, feel free to grab the code from the source and do whatever you like with it.

Play the game at elbertf.com/tetris

Feature-wise not much has changed since the Beta and Release Candidate cycles but the code has been thoroughly tested and improved where possible. If you’re planning on building a PHP website, give Swiftlet a try.

I moved the project page and documentation away from Google Code, if you go to swiftlet.org you’ll find the new page. It’s powered by a documentation system that I custom coded (dubbed Pintail). If there is any interest I will release the code behind it as Open-Source as well.

One of the most important recently added features is the plug-in installer. It checks for compatibility with the core code and creates and populates database tables with a click of the mouse. Plug-ins that don’t require a database connection don’t need to be installed; they’re plug-and-play (and Swiftlet runs fine without a database).

I also added plug-ins to handle user sessions and authorization. This should make it easy to create a website that requires a login system.

Download: code.google.com/p/swiftlet/downloads/list

It’s targeted at developers who want to built simple websites that don’t require large and complex frameworks, but do want a solid base to work from. Swiftlet provides basic security features such as user input sanitizing, is highly extensible thanks to the deeply integrated hook system, completely Object Oriented and separates logic from design (MVC).

Even the most basic features such as connecting to a database and output buffering are implemented as plug-ins. This means they can be modified, extended and removed without hacking into the core code.

Website: http://swiftlet.org