Tessera was created out of a need for a truly minimal PHP framework. It does what it says on the box, and nothing else.
Tessera keeps program logic and display content totally separate. Each URL pattern is associated with a method inside of your application's class, from which no output should be directly generated.
Tessera is inspired by successful frameworks from other languages. Much of Tessera is taken from Sinatra, Juno, and web.py.