In the summer of 2002, Darrell Brogdon found himself laid off and in an unfriendly job market. He decided to try his hand at doing freelance web development until the market heated back up. While he didn't make very much money he did design and begin building the code that would become Alchitect.
At first it was to scratch an itch. Darrell found himself doing the same core tasks over and over again for each project. The library of code he built became more cohesive into a framework. He realized that with some spit and polish the framework could be built in such a way that it would be easy to install and use for other developers.
As is often the case life got a little bit in the way of continued development of Alchitect but over the years Darrell continued to refine (and rewrite) it. Finally, in 2008 after losing another job in a frigid job market he decided that the time was right to release Alchitect.
Sure, there is no shortage of frameworks out there. But Alchitect aims to be different. Most frameworks are designed by and for developers. Nothing wrong with that but installing and using them tends to leave out the designers or those that are less technically minded.
Alchitect is different in that its easy to set up and easy to use. Designers can use it without having to learn very much PHP. The benefit to developers is that the things that every web application needs are taken care of so they are free to add features to the project.
Also, Alchitect tries to lend a helping hand. Not in the "Microsoft Office Snippy please stop popping giving me the same suggestion or I'm seriously going to melt your paperclip body down" kind-of way. But it relies on techniques for simplifying tasks like creating database tables. Alchitect can actually analyze your HTML and based on the forms contained within, create the database tables automatically. And using the Active Record pattern makes interacting with the database a breeze!
We think Alchitect is great but its not for everybody. Many developers don't like having a lot of functionality abstracted away from them. If that is you then you might prefer something other than Alchitect for your projects.
But beyond that Alchitect is Open Source software and freely available to anyone to use.