> If you have installation issues or you are connected to the Internet through China please, [click here](https://kataras.gitbooks.io/iris/content/install.html).
Hi, my name is Gerasimos Maropoulos and I'm the author of this project, let me put a few words about me.
I started to design iris the night of the 13 March 2016, some weeks later, iris started to became famous and I have to fix many issues and implement new features, but I didn't have time to work on Iris because I had a part time job and the (software engineering) colleague which I studied.
I wanted to make iris' users proud of the framework they're using, so I decided to interupt my studies and colleague, two days later I left from my part time job also.
Today I spend all my days and nights coding for Iris, and I'm happy about this, therefore I have zero incoming value.
The Iris philosophy is to provide robust tooling for HTTP, making it a great solution for single page applications, web sites, hybrids, or public HTTP APIs. Keep note that, today, iris has the clostest performance to the nginx.
Iris does not force you to use any specific ORM or template engine. With support for the most used template engines, you can quickly craft the perfect application.
I recommend writing your API tests using this new library, [httpexpect](https://github.com/gavv/httpexpect) which supports Iris and fasthttp now, after my request [here](https://github.com/gavv/httpexpect/issues/2). You can find Iris examples [here](https://github.com/gavv/httpexpect/blob/master/example/iris_test.go), [here](https://github.com/kataras/iris/blob/master/http_test.go) and [here](https://github.com/kataras/iris/blob/master/context_test.go).
If you are interested in contributing to the Iris project, please make sure that you read the document [CONTRIBUTING](https://github.com/kataras/iris/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md) first.
The big thanks goes to [all people](https://github.com/kataras/iris/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=label%3A%22feature+request%22) who help building this framework with feature-requests & bug reports!
The author of Iris is [@kataras](https://github.com/kataras). If **you**'re willing to donate, feel **free** to navigate to the [DONATIONS PAGE](https://github.com/kataras/iris/blob/master/DONATIONS.md).
