In this article I'll introduce you to Limonade, highlighting its key features by building a simple exercise diary (incidentally, this Limonade introduction is the latest installment of my ongoing review of lightweight PHP frameworks see Fat-Free, DooPHP, and my top ten list of lightweight frameworks).

He goes through the installation process (grabbing the latest version from Github) and shows how to create a first route and view for a "welcome" message. He also shows how to use a layout and pull in information from a text file to display in the view.

Indeed, the quality of Rails, CakePHP, Django, and Catalyst notwithstanding, some developers have rebuffed the large frameworks, citing bulk and complexity, to create smaller and simpler alternatives. Dubbed micro-frameworks-think microcomputer versus mainframe-the tools shape incoming requests into something manageable and leave the rest up to you. Choose your design pattern, object-relational mapper (ORM), and rendering technology, and off you go. As you'll see, a working Web application can be composed in less than ten lines of code in a single source file.

He covers the Ruby framework first (Sinatra) and Limonade next. The framework takes incoming requests and maps them into the developed code. It works like a basic MVC-formatted framework - the request comes in with an action and is sent to a method by the same name. You can use wildcards in the URI, regular expression matching, views, templates and it includes error handling support and configuration option support.