Tau

Note

With the addition of TauSQLite and TauDbQuery in November 2022, this library no longer supports PHP versions below 7.4. If you do not use TauSQLite or TauDbQuery it should still remain functional for legacy PHP versions.

Tau is a small PHP library with common routines required in many apps. It is not a framework, and thus does not specify how you code. Yay!

I mentioned small, right?

As of May 2015, it comes in at a whopping 166K. That's K, as in Kilobytes. As a comparison, one of the smaller and most popular PHP frameworks comes in at 103 megabytes when it, and its dependencies (parts of Symphony, Doctrine, etc.) are installed. Of course, that framework has a large userbase and has several additional features, but nothing major.

As far as I know, Tau is only used on one major website. The website gets 10s of millions of hits a month, so it should be pretty stable.

Installation

Download the zip, uncompress it to your includes directory, and include "Tau.php."

Someday I may add it to composer, but I want to make it more full featured before doing that.

Phar

I'm not a big fan of Phar files because they take longer to load, but if you want to make one, the following are the easiest steps I've found:

Download and extract empir.zip from http://sourceforge.net/projects/empir/files/latest/empir-1.0.0.tar/download

Run the following command:

php -dphar.readonly=0 empir make Tau.phar Tau.php . --exclude="samples/*"