On his blog today Shameer Chamal has a new post about a framework he's recently developed an appreciation for (he calls it "awesome" in fact) - Kohana.

In this article we will discuss some important features of Kohana, a promising and the sexiest community driven php framework. This article is pretty basic and intended to instigate those who are still not familiar with this framework. One of the problem with this framework is the lack of well organized documentation. Anyway there are many useful resources available and I have mentioned some of them at the end of this article.

He talks about some of the things he likes best about the framework including its HMVC (hierarchical Model view controller) support allowing you to cascade files down, allowing overrides at any level (good illustration here). He also talks about the scalability it offers and how, because of the HMVC functionality, you can split things up into interchangeable parts that can be pulled in based on the situation. Other features briefly mentioned include easy configuration, security and the exception handling and profiling.

On the Ibuildings techPortal there's a new tutorial from Sam de Freyssinet that follows up on a previous article he wrote about using HMVC (Hierarchical-Model-View-Controller). In this new article, he talks about some of the things you can do with that pattern to increase performance.

Hierarchical-MVC has been shown to make large web applications easier to scale out, but there is a price to pay— namely overall performance. This article will investigate ways of improving performance within HMVC web applications using asynchronous processing and some good old caching techniques. Predominantly this article will use examples written for the Kohana Framework; however all the concepts portrayed here could apply to any framework or web application.

He starts by pointing out what's wrong with the typical HMVC application - namely that the clean separation of code structure (the hierarchical part) costs the application in overall speed and memory usage. He suggests a simple technology for helping ease the load - caching as much information as possible, mostly in the HTTP client code since HMVC applications rely heavily on it. Code samples includd show how to implement this in a simple Kohana application.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today there's a new post by Sam de Freyssinet about a slight modification to a well-known pattern (MVC) by adding some scalability - the Hierarchical-Model-View-Controller pattern.

It can also be very costly in time and resources to re-architect software that not scaled well. Ideally applications should grow organically as required and without large sums of money being exchanged in the process. [...] The Hierarchical-Model-View-Controller (HMVC) pattern is a direct extension to the MVC pattern that manages to solve many of the scalability issues already mentioned [in this post].

He talks about the benefits of the HMVC style and how its multiple parts work together and how it promotes code reuse more than the traditional MVC pattern. Some sample code is included so you can get your hands dirty with more than just the concepts behind the pattern including a more real-world example, their service (Gazouillement) that works similarly to twitter.