Drew C King: PHP Developer

I thought I might take a little step back here from my previous entry regarding my simplistic, not-all-that-original MVC using auto_prepend_file. I realized that I didn’t really explain why I occasionally get in that “there’s-got-to-be-a-simpler-way” frame of mind.

As I was building Camber, I made it a point to stick with an object-oriented design as closely as possible. The bootstrap script (i.e., index.php) simply sets up the basic environment, creates the main objects that are needed for the application, and starts things flowing. To re-cap, the whole life-cycle for a request in a Camber application is:

1. Create the Application object
2. Create the Controller object by passing in the Application
3. Call $controller->getResource() which returns a Resource object
4. Call $resource->run(), which returns the Response object
5. Call $response->send() to send the response back

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I often get the impression that there’s too much unnecessary complexity in the approaches to MVC that are currently in use in PHP, primarily with regard to request handlers and controllers. I’m even guilty of it myself with my ironic attempt at object-oriented simplicity, Camber. So when the mood strikes me, I’ll poke around in forums and articles and look for novel approaches to these problems.

A few years ago, Harry Fuecks posted an entry on his wiki-in-progress regarding PHP and the Front Controller design pattern. I’ve stumbled across this entry a few times before, but I always left it for dead, thinking it was just too simplistic. But recently I decided to try picking up where he left off at the end of his entry to see for myself how far the technique could be taken.

It’s nothing new really. The idea is to use auto_prepend_file and auto_append_file to control the global aspects of your application. For those who are unaware, these two directives allow you to specify scripts that you want to run just before and just after every requested PHP script, either on a per-directory basis, or throughout your entire virtualhost. For example, assume you’ve got a simple personal web site with a page called contact.php that looks like this:
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