What Quillstack is
This is Quillstack for PHP. The way of working is meant to outlast the language — see Quillstack for Python for what that means and what exists of it so far — but everything on this page and everything under it is PHP.
Quillstack is a framework for building APIs, made of thirty-six packages that each work on their own. It was written to answer a question its author kept running into: why does picking a framework mean picking between one that is pleasant to use and one that is rigorous about how it is built?
The whole stack contains no third-party implementations. The only outside code anywhere in it is the PSR interfaces — psr/http-message, psr/log, psr/container and the rest, which are interfaces and nothing else. There is no Symfony component underneath, no Monolog, no Doctrine. That is not a boast about invented wheels; it is what makes the next part possible.
What that buys
Because every part is ours, the parts can be made to fit each other rather than to tolerate each other:
- An N+1 query is not a mistake to avoid — it cannot be written. The ORM loads a relation for the whole result set at once, so asking a hundred users for their posts is two queries whether you thought about it or not.
- A route says what reaching it requires, and one middleware enforces it. A controller has nothing to remember. A guarded route with no identity provider configured refuses to boot rather than quietly letting everyone through.
- A field reaches the wire because somebody said it may. Add a column tomorrow and it is not in the API today.
What it does not do
It does not render HTML, and it has no view layer, no asset pipeline and no front-end integration. It builds APIs. If you want a framework that does everything, this is not it.
It is also young: every package is in its 0.x line, and the version numbers mean what they say — see Versioning.
Where to go next
- Installation — a running application in three commands
- Your first route — how a request finds a controller
- Packages — all thirty-six, and what each is for