I had the chance to work with great people before, and had lots of talks about the zend framework or symfony. I heard a lot about their processes, their pros and cons, but didn’t get the point with using those big engines for small/medium projects.

It was a good time for me. I enjoyed a lot scratching my head on problems that i knew Zend or Symfo writers had. About the structure, about performances. Since i still feel newbie with php, i didn’t matter that much on execution’s performances.

Since my project folder was fully empty, I first put some basics concepts, such as a lib folder that would have contained common framework code, a src folder that would have contained my app code, and a www folder in which i would have put public files.

Then, i started with a single monolithic static object called “App” in that lib/ folder, and a index.php in www/ that triggers my App::dispatch method, with also an .htaccess file that redirects any non-physical request to the index.php file.

After that, my strategy was to parse the url with a single type of route which was /{controller}/{action}/{parameters}.

Project changed, and a second app was also needed : the backend. I added a src/ folder that would contain a specific folder for each application handled by the framework. Since i didn’t know the best way to link urls to specific applications, i built a simple file which was called “config.php” containing an associative array was describing this relationship between urls and application.

When it was about to choose how i would do to call my actions, i started to understand why framework suffixes controller and action names : they probably needed to avoid multiple definition that could occurs between lib code and app code that couldn’t be under control.

I was not very happy with having a big structure with controller objects that had actions as methods, it looked very huge to me. As i’m a wordpress fan, i decided to use filesystem’s file as controller’s concept and simple global functions as action.

I only had to have function index($params = null) {} in my src/front/controllers/index.php file and it was working ! YAY ! After that, all was easy :) My process was kind of defined, so it was only about pimping it up… and that’s what i did !

I added a functions.php file which acted as a starter file of each application, and so i learnt about the “pre” and “post” dispatch concept i heard so much about from panosru.

I also changed the config.php file to a more simple xml file that would be parsed automatically… MUCH easier, and also inspired by the Zend’s ini file. I still ask myself if xml is the best format. I still prefer it from others, but i’ll like to consider using json, yaml or ini too.

Danetag told me a long time ago about orms, and about doctrine was working. I wanted to try myself, something more humble of course. I wrote a first “Model” object that would contain all the logic of a single abstract model object. I thought it was logic to have a static “get” method, since any model object should perform a get action to a database. Then, the instances should be able to be saved or deleted. The save method should know if an insert or update query should occur. My implementation was working fine, but i was too deep in the code to see that i would had to call Model::get any time i would get something. That was very bad because i was expecting something like User::get, or Admin::get… Hopefully for myself, php keeps inheritance of static methods. It’s still a strange and disturbing thing to me but it looks like php won’t change, since it’s still working wih php6.

I’m still not able to make NN requests, and i’m not that confident with execution’s performances. But as a piece of learning, i really enjoy what i did. I learnt a lot, and i highly recommand to try this trip into mvc. You’re in front of choices that others took before, you’re passing through some state of mind they probably had, and you take decisions that may be different than them. If the timing is good, try yourself, you’ll know what i meant ;)

I’m currently re-writing the url parsing, to let the coder choose the url pattern. I also want to taste the difficulty of i18n better than i tried to do (aka ‘DIY’).

I put my code on github, if you give it a try, feel free to comment.

Don’t be rude, it’s a 0.1 alpha :)