Phalcon (framework)
Phalcon is a PHP web framework based on the model–view–controller (MVC) pattern. Originally released in 2012, it is an open-source framework licensed under the terms of the BSD License. Unlike most PHP frameworks, Phalcon is implemented as a web server extension written in Zephir and C, aiming to boost execution speed, reduce resource usage, and handle more HTTP requests per second than comparable frameworks written primarily in PHP. One drawback of this approach is that root/administrative access is required on the server to install Phalcon by building a custom binary or using a precompiled  one. History. Phalcon was created by Andrés Gutiérrez and collaborators looking for a new approach to traditional web application frameworks written in PHP. The original draft of the framework in 2011 was called "Spark", the name was later changed to Phalcon, representing the words "PHP" and "falcon". Phalcon's initial release was made available on November 14, 2012. Phalcon 0.3.5 includes an ORM written in C, MVC components, and cache components. This release was followed by the Phalcon 0.5.0 that brought a high-level dialect of SQL called PHQL, and Phalcon 0.6.0 that introduced Volt, a template engine similar to  Jinja. Phalcon 1.0 was released on March 22, 2013. with Phalcon 1.3 being the last minor release in that series. Phalcon 2.0 saw most of the project ported from C to Zephir. Phalcon 3.0.0 was released on 29 July 2016, this major release includes support for PHP 7 as well as being Phalcon's first LTS (Long Term Support) release. Phalcon also adopted SemVer for their next releases versioning. Phalcon 4.0.0 was released on 21 December 2019, this major release includes support for PHP 7.2, 7.3 and 7.4 has Stricter Interfaces and support PSR-3, PSR-7, PSR-11 (proxy), PSR-13, PSR-16, PSR-17 . On 19 August 2020, it was announced that Serghei, the core contributor on the Zephir language was stepping down from the project, thus leaving the language in an unmaintained state. The Phalcon Team decided to abandon the language and port the framework over to a native PHP application for Version 5. Version 5 will be the first version of Phalcon to support PHP 8. A Phalcon Hangout on 6 September 2020 announced that work has started on Phalcon 5. With this announcement, the projects new repositories were officially made public. Phalcon Slayer is a wrapper that restructures the Phalcon framework