I’ve decided to give a name to this barebones framework that I’ve been playing with for the past couple of months. I’m calling it Comb. Unfortunately it takes a long time to fully explain the thinking behind the name. Similar to Camber, however, the jist of it is simplicity; think “get the tangles out of my code”. Plus comb is a lot faster to say and type than MVCish-framework-based-on-autoprependfile-and-output-buffering. Read the rest of this entry
In the past I’ve upgraded Wordpress the old school way: download latest.tar.gz, unzipped to a temp dir, backed up the database, backed up my docroot, copied the new files into place, ran the upgrade script, and made sure all was right with the world. Not terribly difficult to do, but very much a hassle that I very much preferred to avoid.
But then this morning I decided to glance a bit further down the Upgrading WordPress page and saw this little gem: Read the rest of this entry
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:
Application objectController object by passing in the Application$controller->getResource() which returns a Resource object$resource->run(), which returns the Response object$response->send() to send the response backI 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 Read the rest of this entrycontact.php that looks like this:
Over the past few months I’ve been adding code to this previously unnamed LAMP framework, but I’ve honestly been reluctant to call it a framework. That’s what it is though, so instead of constantly referring to it as “my little minimalist pseudo-framework”, I decided to give the thing a name. I’ve been mulling it over for several months now, and finally settled on Camber as the name. I wanted to be sure that it was easy enough to remember, but also meaningful to the overall goal of the project. According to Google:
Camber: The curvature of a structural member for the purpose of offsetting the deflection when loads are applied.
Camber is not a complex idea, nor is it difficult to implement where it’s needed. It’s used in many everyday load-bearing applications; the wheels of a car, the shape of skis and snowboards, the bottom of a bridge, the shape of a wing. The performance of each of these is greatly enhanced – if not utterly dependent – on something as simple as the underlying negative curvature.
Sounds like a pretty good description of a web application framework, eh?
Unfortunately, I’ve been really slack about keeping this here blog up to date with the actual code I’ve been writing. I have a tendency to drone on and on about each concept of the system, so I think I need to take smaller bites. One post per day maybe, with no more than 2 or 3 snippets of code.