What is PRADO?
The PRADO framework is an open source programming framework for creating professional web applications. PRADO means PHP Rapid Application Development Object-oriented. It is component-based and allows event-driven programming. PRADO, which has a configurable and pluggable modular architecture, supports Ajax components and offers customizable and localizable error handling, generic caching modules and selective output caching.

This free PHP framework only requires a web server with PHP 5.1.0 or later. Granted with a revised BSD License, PRADO is suitable for developing both open source and commercial applications.

PRADO framework - overview
The PRADO framework's main goal is to ensure reusability in web programming, which involves not only reusing one's own code, but also others’, and which may considerably decrease the development time. The introduction of the notion of the component is for this purpose.

Being a component-based framework, PRADO offers a protocol for writing components to build web applications. A component is a self-contained software unit that can be reused after a small customization. New components can be created by combining existing ones.

So as to facilitate the interaction with the components, PRADO executes an event-driven programming method that allows delegation of extensible behavior to the components. End-user activities, among them clicking on a submit button, are captured as server events. Methods or functions may be attached to these events so that when the latter happen, they are invoked automatically to respond to them. The event-driven programming model helps developers to better focus on the necessary logic and reduces the low-level repetitive coding as compared to the traditional web programming where they have to deal with raw POST and GET variables.

In summary, the development of a PRADO web application basically involves instantiation of prebuilt component types and their composition into pages in the application. You have to set their properties to configure them, and write handler functions to respond to their events. PRADO, which is very easy to learn, resembles ASP.NET, unlike other PHP frameworks.

In PRADO, users can directly access only one script - namely the application's index.php entry script. This file is required by all PRADO applications and mainly consists of the following three lines.

Link to the official website: http://www.pradosoft.com