Thanks for the link. Recess is a full-stack PHP framework I've been working on the last 12 weeks or so. This preview release is intended to demonstrate core functionalities and help work out major issues. Over the next couple of weeks I'll be focusing on documentation, screen casts, and stabilization.
There are some interesting and novel techniques being used in Recess that you won't see in other popular PHP frameworks. It's a framework I believe will cater well to hackers and the HN crowd.
This is towards the top of list of documents to produce. More screen casts demonstrating other features of the framework are also on the way.
The overarching mission of Recess is to provide a full-stack framework with functionality along the lines of Cake but designed for PHP (as opposed to attempting to clone Rails which leads to poor design decisions as PHP != Ruby). This way Recess will achieve the performance characteristics of CodeIgniter without sacrificing higher-order functionality of modern full-stack frameworks like Django and Rails.
Registering at this stage is required as solid documentation/tutorials are still on their way (now the top priority) so having a simple, single place to go for support/discussion is important to help bridge the gap between now and then. Download away but reconsider registering if you run into issues or questions.
Even exceedingly tech-savvy users will avoid using things that require registration. By all means - encourage registration, but if you require it when it isn't strictly necessary, you'll run off most of your potential users.
looks interesting. I like the way it promotes good coding practices and your idea of relative routes is cool.
Don't know about including routing info in controllers though. I wasn't able to tell what the benefit of doing it this way is over having a routes config file. Seems that the routes would get hard to manage in a large app (even with the route browser tool).
Thanks for the feedback. The belief is that though this practice may feel uncomfortable at first it should make things easier to mange in large applications. The premise is routes don't exist without a controller and method to route to - so why duplicate that information in another place? With routes stored somewhere else if you want to change a method name in a big app (especially one you're not the sole author of) there is an extra step of finding all the places that method name was potentially referenced. Routes in controllers is an attempt at being more DRY than routes.rb and less raw than Django's list of regexps.
For what its worth Rails actually generates code with comments that give examples of routes in its controllers: http://tinyurl.com/5jstgu
There are some interesting and novel techniques being used in Recess that you won't see in other popular PHP frameworks. It's a framework I believe will cater well to hackers and the HN crowd.