The idea for a library that gives access to common php-meta-programming facilities was already mentioned in the [[SocApplication][application]] for the [[http://code.google.com/soc/][SoC]]. A quote:
The community will also get a basis for building more programs that can be used to improve their code.
The be able to easily extract this part of the project we made two libraries within the [[PhpSat][PHP-Sat]] package. The grammar and the tests for the PHP-Front library where constantly separated from the ones for PHP-sat. This made it very easy to split the two packages. This was done on a Friday (01-09-2006) that was filled with renaming, chatting and nuts. The name PHP-Front is a PHP-version of the name for a package that enables you to generate and / or transform Java code: [[http://www.stratego-language.org/Stratego/JavaFront][Java-Front]].