Stripped-down Magento as a framework?

Question

I've been working with Magento for a while now and really enjoy developing modules for it. Lately I've been wondering if it's possible/feasible to strip out the ecommerce aspect and use the core components as an application framework, similar to ZF or CakePHP.

For example, inside /app/code/core/, everything except the following would be removed:

• Mage/Adminhtml
• Mage/Admin
• Mage/Core
• (I might be missing a couple other important pieces)
• All Varien and Zend code would also remain intact.

You would be able to develop custom web applications while taking advantage of support for:

• Modules
• Blocks, layouts, and templates
• Backend with users, permissions, and configuration
• Mage static methods to getModel, etc
• Translations
• Web services

Is this feasible or even a good idea?

Answer 1

Colin Mollenhour has something along these lines already:

https://github.com/colinmollenhour/magento-lite

Thanks to Vinai Kopp for telling me about this during the XDevCamp at the 2011 Magento Innovate Conference! :)

Answer 2

There have been rumors of this being done. Given that the idea is academically interesting and that the possibility exists, I mention it whenever I teach the Magento U Fundamentals of Magento Development course.

Magento is fundamentally an MVC app framework with eCommerce components. I first heard this idea at Magento's Imagine conference in 2011. Alan Storm mentioned this during the developer track or the developer un-conference. I liked the notion immediately.

In addition to the items you cited, one would need to include Mage_Eav if one were going to require Magento-style EAV entity modeling and attribute management. Mage_Page would also be a strong candidate for inclusion if one were used to that module's handling of various page elements.