The Lithium project continues to make rapid development progress, and has hit version 0.8. Lead Developer Nate Abele announced the release on the Lithium blog, noting that they are just two releases away from hitting that magical version 1.0—at which time, he hopes, businesses will be more comfortable using the framework, since it will have a nice, stable API from which to work.

Several changes made it into Lithium 0.8, but of most interest to me personally (and perhaps to you as well) is the refactored test suite, allowing for easier automated testing. I’m attempting to do more and more of my development in a test-driven way, and I’m keen on taking a look at how Lithium might allow me to do this quickly and easily.

You may recall that Lithium is something of a fork of the CakePHP project. However, Lithium is more tuned for a PHP 5.3 environment. I was fortunate to have sat in on Nate’s Zendcon presentation on Lithium, right as he announced the project, and I’m excited at how far it has come in so short of a time.

If you are interested in Lithium and would like to download version 0.8, you can download it (or any of the prior versions) from the Lithium downloads page.