I don't like how they use static methods for almost everything.

What's the downside with static methods? It makes sense to me that they use them for factories and now that the can be effectively overridden in PHP5.3, I'm not sure why it's a bad thing... perhaps just a personal preference?

Thanks for the heads up, now I know I don't even have to bother checking it out...

I'm going to be giving that a go too at some point. Probably just for benchmarking though ;)

it looks good. have any other specific thoughts on it? strengths/weaknesses?

Well, it seems basically pretty codeigniter-like, but much improved, dropping legacy stuff. The docs still need work (they don't even mention the form lib for example), I might help out with that. I hope they take it to a stable and well documented 1.0 (they're in beta now).

think the CI community branch will detract any from this project?

No, in fact, some of the same people are involved. The CI community thing will still be CI. This is fresh, from the ground up.

i know, and that is what i meant, actually. looks like a good bit of crossover, and if they're going to work on CI community, too, that probably means less work on fuel. and who knows, maybe there's some sort of contractual obligations in there, as well.