The Horde Project is about creating high quality Open Source applications, based on PHP and the Horde Framework.

The guiding principles of the Horde Project are to create solid standards-based applications using intelligent object oriented design that, wherever possible, are designed to run on a wide range of platforms and backends.

There is great emphasis on making Horde as friendly to non-English speakers as possible. The Horde Framework currently supports many localization features such as unicode and right-to-left text and generous users have contributed many translations for the framework and applications.

Currently Horde Project boasts many applications, some already enterprise-ready and deployed in demanding environments, and some exciting new ones still in development.

The Code

The development of the framework and the applications is a community process, with contributions both from individual developers and corporations. The Core Team members are the people who are actively involved on the development in designing and coding the framework and applications.

The applications are under various Open Source licenses, mostly under the GNU Public License. The Horde Framework itself, as of version 2.0, is released under the LGPL.

The Horde applications are written in PHP, a scripting language explicitly designed to be embedded in web pages. PHP can be embedded directly into the web server, with plugins for not just Apache but also IIS, Sun Web Server, etc.

PHP is currently at version 5, with many improvements including a new object model, improved XML and web services support. Horde modules should run on any platform that can run PHP (including as a cgi), assuming any required support modules (IMAP, for instance) are present.