NOLOH is an event-driven lightweight, on-demand, object-oriented Web application development platform. It is ideal for developing feature-rich web sites and web applications faster and with fewer resources. NOLOH extends PHP 5.1+, eliminates the need for HTML and JavaScript, and builds in many advanced features such as codeless AJAX, Comet, automatic SEO and a full suite of UI controls.

You can find extensive documentation at http://dev.noloh.com. You can also watch numerous videos on our YouTube channel.

You can get immediate help in NOLOH's IRC channel at #noloh on irc.freenode.net. A member of the NOLOH team will be able to help you with your program or answer any questions you might have. You can also send us an e-mail at support@noloh.com.

NOLOH stands for "Not One Line of HTML®." What this means is that there will be no markup that dictates what your program does. However, you can of course still use markup/HTML to display static content. You can even interact with NOLOH using your markup in unprecedented ways, while still retaining complete control in your code. See MarkupRegion and RichMarkupRegion for more information.

We have tried various accessibility software (and emulators) on NOLOH applications with good results. However, because of the diversity of these programs and the complexity of the problem of making rich applications accessible, we feel we cannot really tout accessibility as a fully complete feature of NOLOH quite yet. But there are two exciting things on the horizon of this developer challenge! As you may already know, the W3C has a subsection called the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), and they have this to say:

1) "People with disabilities (using desktop or laptop computers) and people without disabilities who are using mobile devices have similar interaction limitations and they experience similar barriers when interacting with Web sites." (http://www.w3.org/WAI/mobile/experiences) At this very moment, we are developing into the kernel a way to render NOLOH applications to mobile phones and browsers without JavaScript (completely transparent to the developer, of course) to provide them with a nice, degraded experience. This feature is on the version 1.7 roadmap and will be complete soon. Consequently, according to the WAI article, this system would be of much help to people with disabilities.

2) The WAI has been drafting a set of guidelines and standards for Rich Internet Applications called the WAI-ARIA. This research is aimed at tackling the problem of making common web widgets (the example they like to use is TreeList, which is a built-in NOLOH Control) interact well with accessibility software. We have been following these developments closely. As soon as they make their work in progress official, you can bet that we will begin implementing their suggestions into the NOLOH kernel transparently to the developer. The result of this effort should be an unprecedented feature-rich experience for people with disabilities.

One of NOLOH's core tenets is that applications should be available to as many clients as possible, no matter what browser they use, whether they're on their cellphone, etc... In the case of each type of client, we make the application as feature-rich as possible. To broaden this user base in any way, in this case to include clients with accessibility needs, is always a very exciting possibility. Another of NOLOH's tenets is that the kernel should completely handle all these tasks transparently to the developer, so that code you write in NOLOH now will likely not have to be changed at all when we incorporate the various ARIA guidelines.

So to answer your question shortly: Right now, NOLOH applications interact fairly well with accessibility software. In the future, after the completion of the mobile system described in (1), and the release of ARIA standards described in (2), the level of interaction and feature-rich experience for people with disabilities will be totally unprecedented. Thank You for your inquiry,

NOLOH automatically manages all aspects of user view state. Application developers can choose to store/restore view state to make it persistent across sessions.

PHP is the fourth most popular programming language and the most popular language for developing web applications. According to Netcraft PHP is installed at over 1.2 million IP addresses hosting over 20 million web sites. There's also a very large and active community of PHP developers.

No. PHP is an interpreted language so development cycles tend to be faster than with compiled languages like Java. It's nice to be able to make a change to the code, save the change, and then just click the refresh button on the browser to see the effect of the change.

No, actually. In fact we think that's understating the situation. NOLOH was developed in the belief that developing compelling rich Internet applications is much harder than it needs to be. In large measure, the reasons for this are historical. We believe that the complexity of the current development toolset -- which includes user interface design tools such as Dreamweaver, presentation markup languages (X/HTML/CSS), data formatting languages (XML, JSON) a client-side programming language (JavaScript), server-side programming languages (PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, ASP .Net, etc., and custom markup languages such as CFML, BXML, MXML), a database programming language (SQL), and enhanced http protocols (xmlhttprequest) -- is to blame. The development paradigm is complicated because it's been built up layer upon layer upon layer over more than a decade. Until NOLOH there's been no comprehensive re-thinking of the web development paradigm.

On the server side, all that is required is an HTTP server that can be configured for PHP with PHP 5.1 or greater installed. That's it.

NOLOH may sound too good to be true but as you can see, it's not vaporware. NOLOH came about simply by looking at the way rich Internet application development is currently being done and asking if there was a better way to do it. Rather than accepting the status quo and kludging together existing tools and protocols, the developers of NOLOH consciously chose to set out on an entirely different path.

No. You don't need to do anything different at all to develop applications with AJAX-like capabilities in NOLOH. As with HTML and JavaScript, NOLOH will take care of all the boring, tedious, repetitive, error-prone details.

Writing browser-specific HTML and JavaScript is boring, tedious, repetitive, and error prone -- especially to maintain. Just the sort of thing that a computer program can be built to do. With NOLOH you spend zero time debugging HTML and JavaScript code because all NOLOH objects "know" how to draw themselves correctly for all supported browsers. NOLOH is like a desktop application development framework -- but for the Internet.

Not really. It's a lot like overnight success that's been 20 years in the making. If it were that simple nobody would have found the need to develop MVC frameworks or use Ajax which, in our opinion, are overly complicated.

Of course not. NOLOH is fundamentally object oriented so you can write your own objects and incorporate them into NOLOH applications as you see fit, often without any modifications. You can use your own library of functions and you can even use code from repositories such as PEAR. You can even extend the included controls and modify them with custom programming including custom JavaScript if you don't like the way a built-in control works. If you do that, however, we encourage you to write them "the NOLOH way" -- by writing them in such a way that using them does not require intermingling what is being presented with how it is presented.

No. You can use any and all of the tools you are currently using to develop applications in PHP. While NOLOH was built using object-oriented principles and object-oriented approaches are encouraged, NOLOH neither requires the use of any particular development tool nor enforces any particular development approach, methodology, or design pattern. You could, if you wanted, develop an MVC framework using NOLOH if you wanted to implement that design pattern.