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Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Building a Simplified PHP MVC Framework

In his famous pragmatic style, Rasmus Lerdorf has shared an article on his Toys blog that will walk you through what he calls a "no-framework PHP MVC framework." The task is a simple rich Web application, with SQLite and PDO for data abstraction, Ajax and JSON for data validation (input sanitation is achieved through the PECL filter package), and several components from the Yahoo! User Interface Library. All tied together with PHP, JavaScript and HTML, just like you'd expect.

Along the way he also shares plenty of performance tips to help keep your applications responsive. Given that Rasmus is the Infrastructure Architect at Yahoo! (not to mention the creator of PHP), he might know a thing or two about dealing with large numbers of requests. So, if the thought of refactoring a large, complex framework doesn't suit your project, consider rolling your own simplified MVC stack. This article is a great place to gather some ideas.

tags: ajax, developer, framework, html, javascript, json, mvc, php, programming, ria, tutorial, validation, web 2.0, yahoo

Posted by Douglas Clifton in PHP, Programming at 16:15 | Comments (6) | Trackback (1)

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Simplified PHP MVC Framework
Click through for tips from a Yahoo infrastructure architect....

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Thanks for the link Douglas. Good to read his viewpoint on frameworks and building applications.

#1 Matthijs on 2006-03-01 02:57

You're welcome.

Well, it took a few days, but now the comments are starting to flow on Rasmus' post. Naturally, it's turning into a big OOP vs. Procedural argument (again). Sigh.

#2 Doug (Link) on 2006-03-02 19:39

Rasmus Lerdorf's approach is so simple it's blatantly Anti-OO by it's very nature. You would have to be a real sadist to use a strict OO approach on a single web page. [I suspect some people may actually not know anything except the strict OO approach which is their personal problem. Just wish they keep it to themselves.] There are problems where OOP will make your life easier but a single web page isn't one of them.

Rasmus Lerdorf's Simple Guidelines for PHP Programming:

o Try to limit yourself to 5 or less includes per request
o Don't go overboard on OOP. Use where appropriate.
o Same goes for Layers. Abstraction, Indirection, abstract classes.
o Everything has a cost
o Use an opcode cache
o Watch your regular expressions!
o Cache! Cache! Cache!
o If you have plenty of CPU but limited bandwidth, turn on output compression

Been using those guideline for years and I have wound up with the same no-framework approach.

#2.1 Buddha443556 on 2006-03-03 08:47

Rasmus has lots of great advice and I happen to not only agree with him, I've taken the same approach to Web programming for years. Not because I blindly followed his lead, but because I came to the same conclusions on my own long before I ever started to read his thoughts on these matters.

That programmers have to fall into these various "camps," for instance OOP vs. procedural or PHP vs. Rails, is ridiculous. Use the best tool for the job, use the best approach to the problem. The OOP camp, for instance, loves to point out that any procedural approach automatically means the code is spaghetti and unmaintainable. That is simply not true. I've seen plenty of horrible examples of both styles.

Most software, especially Web software, won't last more than a few years anyway. It's disposable, or if it does last it's because the application was so useful (or popular) the whole thing ends up being refactored anyway. Either that or it just hums along nicely w/o anyone having to touch it or "improve" on it.

#3 Doug (Link) on 2006-03-03 15:20

It's really nice to know the MVC framework.
Still looking for good tutorials on it.

#4 Roj Shahi (Link) on 2007-01-29 21:11

I must tell that Rasmus's article shares the perspective of what he started with his endeavour with PHP -- always simple, yet powerful.

I would like to share my experience of programming with PHP, and development of small to large web applications in the recent years. It has been a struggle when we goes for a decision of implementing a fuctional feature or a internal function of an application. We have every possibility of breakaway flexibility and we inadvertently practise random approach to solve a particular problem. Please read one of my blog item at http://ashresort.com/blog/index.php/information-technology/php-programmer-dusk-dilemma for description of this situation.

Now, a few excellent frameworks have come up. I have also proposed specifications of a simple framework for PHP application development at http://ash-mvc.org

Thanks

Ashwini Kumar Rath
http://ashresort.com

#5 Ashwini Kumar Rath (Link) on 2007-02-24 14:17

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