Development of the Tangra Framework started back in 2003 when PHP5 was still in the beta stage. It was inspired by XABIIEN, which stood for eXtensible Application Builder for Internet/Intranet/ExtraNet. However, XABIIEN had many design flaws and was not suitable for creating big applications. When the development of PHP5 reached a more stable stage, the creation of brand-new framework was considered; and thus Tangra was born. The codebase was started from scratch, with only a handful of concepts borrowed from XABIIEN, such as form generation and handling.
The general idea was for Tangra to provide a consistent and unified programming environment using new PHP5 features such as restricted access to class variables (protected and private), interfaces and exceptions. It was also decided to implement a template engine and a database abstraction layer.
The first working version was released in the late autumn of 2004. It was quite basic compared to current state; consisting of a simplistic form and grid generator/handler plus a rudimentary web_site class.
In 2005, it was decided to release Tangra as Open Source, and in December the "tangra" project was registered on SourceForge.
2006 was the year for experiments. A MVC infrastructure was created but it proved to be less usable than originally supposed, so it was dropped.
2007 was the year that experienced the most visible progress of the Tangra Framework. A site was created (» tangraframework.net), some sketchy documentation was written, AJAX controllers were implemented, the module system was finally realized, the Control Center was born, and the wiki and forum were added. Much of this was due to Tangra's main developer leaving his job in order to devote more time to the development of the framework.
In 2008, the first release was published from SourceForge, on 2008-01-02.