On the SitePoint PHP blog today Taylor Ren has shared a tutorial about using Phreeze to easily create CRUD applications for a MySQL backend. Phreeze is made up of three parts: an MVC handler, an ORM for database interaction and the "Phreeze Builder" to generate the application code.

Back in the times of Symfony 1.x, the framework had a powerful backend module to help the developers and site administrators create a good enough app and provide necessary CRUD features to manage the database (and save us from using PHPMyAdmin). [...] In this article, we will take a look at Phreeze, a simple and easy to use PHP framework that can help us generate a MySQL CRUD backend app. I will use my book collection test site as the underlying database. Please refer to my Data Fixtures in Symfony2 article for more details on the database structure.

He walks you through the installation of Phreeze (downloaded from GitHub) and what the first page should look like when pulled up in a browser. The wizard helps with the database setup and lets you pick the tables to generate models for as well as a few other application options. He shows how to integrate this generated code with a simple Symfony2-based application and easily allow for working with the database contents. He modifies the Symfony2 code to handle some additional options to pass into the generated code and talks some about the API interface Phreeze generates automatically.

Jason Hinkle has a new blog post on VerySimple.com today about some recent work he's done to integrate Backbone.js and PHP (via the Phreeze framework's "Builder" tool).

Last year like a lot of other developers I started to get excited about client-side Javascript frameworks. [...] To me it’s basically a little bit of magic that makes your web application seem alive as it responds to any changes made to the data. Backbone.js is one such Javascript framework.

You can use the Builder as a part of the framework application or just use it as an example of how to integrate Backbone.js into a PHP application. The interface for it is nice and clean (and functional) and works with the frameworks' REST interface. You can see it in action in the video and live demo of the sample application.