Allan MacGregor has started a new series of posts to his site where he creates a microframework in Hack, the language created by Facebook to compliment their HHVM (Hip-Hip Virtual Machine) project. He sees it as a "learn by doing" kind of thing and wanted to share his results.

I honestly believe the best way to learn something is to get your hands dirty and make mistakes; so instead of writing dozens of post on the many new features of Hack and why they are awesome (in theory) let's build something useful. So to get started I've decided to build a micro-framework using HACK and HHVM, building a simple microframework should be a challenging enough task to illustrate some of the more interesting features of the language and at the same time it has an achievable goal so we don't end on a never ending development cycle.

His framework, one he calls "Slash", will mostly be about creating RESTful applications but it could, in theory, be for any kind of web application. He also mentions some of the other great microframeworks out there already that are well-developed and have good communities behind them (including Slim and Silex. This is just the first part of the series and introduces some of the "why" around his goal. In the next part of the series he'll get into the structure and routing with some actual framework code.