* Agavi is a general purpose PHP application framework built around the Model-View-Controller architecture originally based on the Mojavi 3 Web application framework written by Sean Kerr. It provides a rich toolset that solves most of the routine problems in Web application development. * Agavi is designed for serious development. It is not a complete website construction kit but rather a skeleton over which you build your application. The architecture of Agavi allows developers to retain very fine control over their code. Agavi itself is written to be extensible, and powerful. Whereas this documentation serves as an important resource, many developers are comfortable learning from Agavi's source code. * Agavi strives to leave most implementational choices to the developers. Agavi's components are inherently extensible, and the framework itself is designed around a XML-based configuration system that provides a very flexible environment. For you — as a developer — this architectural style means that you are required to perform less hacking (or, in most cases, none at all!) at the framework level and therefore have more time to get your application written. * The framework works for almost all kinds of applications but excels most in large codebases, long-term projects, extreme cases of integration and other special situations.

* Stripes is simple in that it doesn't force developers to grok everything about it in order to get started. By not having to know all the details, or even that many of them exist, it's easy for a developer to get the basics and get started. A perfect example of this is the interceptor framework, and the before/after methods. A developer can be blissfully ignorant of these with no negative consequences. But when a need for such a function arises, they are easy to discover. * Stripes, at its core, is an action framework and action frameworks as a whole don't shy away from the fact that the entire web is implemented on top of a stateless protocol (HTTP). It supports backward compatibility.