DropFramwork

This summer, I plunged into the depths of my back up drives and came up with some old projects that were growing some dust. Like most old projects, I find them, get excited. Decide to do a major revolutionary revamp, and ultimately just end up touching up some things and kicking them out the door. The DropFramework is one such thing. For a long time, I wanted to make my own micro-framework to compete with the likes of Slim or Silex. In the end though, I really feel that those two have the space of micro-frameworks very well covered. No one needs yet another PHP micro-framework with half-done ideas floating around. Still, I did want to show it off, so I polished it up a little bit and through it up on github. Below are my thoughts on “Yet Another PHP Microframework”

Yet Another PHP Microframework

For all intensive purposes, you can consider this an abandoned project and I would not recommend anyone actually use this in production.

A few years ago when Code Igniter was still quite a hot thing and a lot of

servers were still running PHP 5.2, e.g. the “dark ages” before we got all the nice things that came along in PHP 5.3 it seemed to be quite the fashion for everyone to try their hand at writing their own framework.

This was my go at it.

You will find a lot of similarities with Code Igniter (since that is the framework I worked with at the time) and you might also find a lot of classes that look like they came straight out of PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice since that was my bible.

I wanted to do a few things in writing the DropFramework:

1. I wanted to better understand the MVC pattern, the choices being made and how CI works.

2. I wanted a framework that was small enough that I could read and understand every class in it.

3. I wanted a framework with a very small footprint that worked by transforming HTTP requests into request objects / command objects. This allowed me to fire up multiple instances of the framework per HTTP request with the master application generating it’s own request objects that it would feed into it’s child instances and then construct a document out of the application responses from the children.

4. I did not like at the time, and still do not like the major design patterns of a lot of ORM solutions which tend to treat the database as the authoritative model of the data. I rather turn this convention upside down: treat the database as just another form of user input. The model can then be constructed from any form of input – the database, an HTTP post, a file. The PHP object is then the authoritative source for how the data structure relates with other data. Any data coming into the model passes through a validation layer that translates it (or rejects it if it invalid).

Whether or not I succeeded at this items? I don’t think I would really know.

Version 0.4.0

The version of the framework that had been sitting on my hard disk for some time was 0.3.0. In deciding to release it I have done two major things:

1. I created a simple example of the framework working. The code for this example is also up on github and a live version as well.

2. I namespaced the entire framework and brought it into PSR-4 compliance allowing for installation via Composer and the use of the Composer autoloader. This defeats a lot of the purpose of the PHP 5.2 era frameworks which devoted a lot of their resources to locating and managing the loading of assets. This, of course, makes this no longer a PHP 5.2 compatible framework and probably even makes a lot of the framework look rather silly.