Library Overview

Most features (and more) of your every day mail client software are provided by Swift Mailer, using object-oriented PHP code as the interface.

In this chapter we will take a short tour of the various components, which put together form the Swift Mailer library as a whole. You will learn key terminology used throughout the rest of this book and you will gain a little understanding of the classes you will work with as you integrate Swift Mailer into your application.

This chapter is intended to prepare you for the information contained in the subsequent chapters of this book. You may choose to skip this chapter if you are fairly technically minded, though it is likely to save you some time in the long run if you at least read between the lines here.

1. System Requirements
   The basic requirements to operate Swift Mailer are extremely minimal and easily achieved. Historically, Swift Mailer has supported both PHP 4 and PHP 5 by following a parallel development workflow. Now in it's fourth major version, and with PHP 4 support officially dropped by its makers at Zend, Swift Mailer operates on servers running PHP 5.2 or higher.
2. Component Breakdown
   Swift Mailer is made up of many classes. Each of these classes can be grouped into a general "component" group which describes the task it is designed to perform.