And its name is…

A few days ago, I happened to discover the Free Software Project Management HOWTO by Benjamin Mako Hill. « This HOWTO tries to do a lot of things », to say it in the author’s words, and I found it to be indeed loaded with good advice.

Just at that time, I had come to the conclusion that I needed a real name for my own project and was struggling to make up something good enough. Of course, the HOWTO not only has naming advice, it also refers to Leslie Orchard’s short but thought-provoking article On Naming an Open Source Project. The lesson in there is that you need to pick a name that is both informative and memorable, and that you’d better not be too clever about the name, if this means you pick something obscure or complicated.

Repeat it once more, and it will look so obvious that it goes without saying. But truth is I was verging towards the obscure and the complicated, and Orchard’s own project’s name, laijutsu, was such (to the point that even the HOWTO gets it wrong in the first place).

So, I started looking for something based upon the prominent traits of my project. It’s obviously got all of the usual suspects: it’s full-stack, it’s MVC, it’s meant for web application development, it’s got an orm layer. But above all, it’s meant to fluently support a rich Model, so as to enable true Domain-Driven Design in PHP development.

DDD is key, and I tried really hard to come with some clever, but not too much, combination of these words. And I failed. Spectacularly.

Suffice it to say that you risked being inflicted names like d³, or ddwd (domain-driven web development, to be pronounced dude).

It was at that point that I recalled that Django got its name from gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. Because Django is influential to me, it suddenly dawned on me that I could pay a tribute to both Django and my own favored musician by calling my project after English conductor sir John Eliot Gardiner.

The Gardiner framework, or just Gardiner, sounds simple and elegant enough to me. Of course, it totally misses the informative part, but so does Django.

I think I can go with this… and I also fear I need a tagline as clever as theirs!