context in other systems

I've been looking at various CMSs, especially the ones that at least claim to aspire to good architecture (e.g. habari, concrete5, modx). Bottom line is that none of the really supporting anything close to the notion of context and next generation blocks that is being discussed here for Drupal. I guess that is not a surprise but I was hoping for at least some initial notions.

In terms of pure PHP frameworks the one that seems to be worth taking a look at is Kohana. First of all for its autoloading awesomeness, although not directly related to context it is definitely worth taking a look at as an example of how that autoloading can be managed: http://kohanaframework.org/guide/using.autoloading

Secondly because it has a clean separation of concerns between Routing, Request, Response and Controller and Views. While it says it is MVC really it is more like a Drupal PAC or a Hierarchical MVC architecture: http://kohanaframework.org/guide/api/Request - definitely clean (and now I see why Rasmus said he was using that during his Keynote in Copenhagen).

So barring any other suggestions of PHP systems to look at we move on to other languages although I have a feeling that this is pretty much the lay of the land and really what we need to be looking at is work on context in true distributed systems because that is what is ultimately being suggested. Problem with such solutions is that they talk about way much more than what is really required at this stage - but they can offer some interesting pointers and at least reasons to support one approach vs another.

http://symfony-reloaded.org/architecture

Symfony2 is built on top of a lightweight and robust Dependency Injection Container, inspired by the Spring one. For a typical project, the developer doesn't interact with the container directly. All the implementation details are hidden behind a nice configuration system that allows everything to be customized via simple YAML or XML files or even via plain PHP code.

I did not take the time yet, but I think this dpi stuff deserves a closer look.

Zend as a lot of good stuff in it, like the ContextSwitch action helper.

The whole idea is that the controller is able to determine which context to use. Contextes are being used in order to output data in a specific format.

But more important, the selected context has the ability to enable or disable the full page layout, and every plugin at every step of the runtime can access the current context and do stuff depending on the current nature/implementation.