While developing and helping others develop PHP applications I noticed the trend to use PHP's arrays in nearly every task. Arrays in PHP are useful but they aren't well suited to object-oriented programming since they are not objects. I made this library to make writing object-oriented code easier and more expressive.

This project requires PHP 5.4 because it uses Traits, the callable type-hint and short-array syntax. Depending on how long this project takes to mature it might require PHP 5.5 for generators and improved handling of non-scalar keys in foreach loops.

This project is unstable and subject to significant changes from release to release. Therefore it requires that you exercise patience if you use it in your project.

There is no official roadmap for this project. I intend to release version 1.0.0 when I am confident enough in the API that it is suitable for public use. Until then, minor versions will be tagged as they are deemed helpful. This project follows semantic versioning.

The best way to help is to use the library and submit issues when you find them. Over 99% of the library has been executed in a unit test but the quality of some of these tests is poor; improved tests are definitely welcome.

Maybe. Open an issue and mark it as a feature request and I'll look into it.

The Standard PHP Library (SPL) has many problems, some of which are documented in an unfinished RFC regarding the SPL. I won't go into them here, but I felt I needed to give at least some reasoning for not using it.

This project was originally aimed to fix the SPL; as such I had named it SPL. Eventually I realized that I would do better with a different name; I picked Ardent it describes how I feel about the need for this kind of library. Right now the Ardent namespace isn't used within the project at all. I will eventually move away from the name Ardent because another PHP project decided to use the name after I had already picked it. I am not sure what the final name will be, so for now they are simply "Collections".