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Bread is a web application development framework written in PHP5, inspired by Ruby on Rails and Ben Nolan's Biscuit. It uses Pear::DB as its database access layer, giving it lots of flexibility. I stumbled across Ruby on Rails fairly recently and really liked it, but I really enjoy developing in PHP. The idea of bread is therefore to try to emulate the ideas and ease of use of Rails and put them to use in a PHP environment. I'm not presuming to aim for a full blown rails clone but rather a tool that will save me from the monotony of writing the same code over and over again for several similar applications.
Bread uses several well known design patterns. Primarily the now ubiquitous MVC pattern which is increasingly the basis of many web applications. The core database functionality is achieved using the ActiveRecord pattern and various elements use the Singleton pattern. Currently Bread is known to work on Linux with apache. The apache module mod_rewrite is required. Since the framework uses Pear::DB you should be able to use any database that Pear::DB supports. In practice, the main ActiveRecord class relies on Pear:DB's tableInfo() function and therefore if your database doesn't support this function, Bread won't work.
Bread is licensed under the GNU General Public Licence V2+. The license details may be missing from some of the source code, but all source code is nevertheless licensed.