Initial considerations and Blitz Framework

• A Small alternative PHP Framework, focusing on small and light projects using MVC (Model, View, Controller) architecture.
• Where:
  • Model is where the logic of the application stays.
    • Querys.
    • Requisitions.
    • Email sending.
    • Etc...
  • View is the layer that contains the data to be sent to the user's browser.
    • HTML.
    • JSON.
    • Forms.
    • Logs.
    • Anything you want to be sent to the browser.
  • Controller says when things will happen.
    • Calls, retains and exchanges data from one or more models or views.

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Features:

• Router;
• Session;
• Database;
• Template;
• Validation Input Data;
• MVC;
• Confs file;
• Easy support custom helpers;
• Controller with support many output's formats data (json, html, plain...);

Requisites:

• PHP 5.3 >=
• Server, like apache2, with module rewrite enabled

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Blitz Framework structure

• app folder.
  • controllers and models folders keep the controllers and the models, respectively.(duh)
  • The view folder has some other folders and files on it.
    • assets folder keeps all sorts of content to be used on client side, such as JS, CSS, PNG and etc...
      • Store it in another place will require changes in .htaccess file, to grant access permission.
    • pages folder keeps the views.
    • templates folder, where the templates are kept.
  • helpers folder. Keeps the generic support functions that may be used on the whole application, like formatters, uploaders and whatnot.
    • To use a helper, you must declare him in the confs.php file, on the $settings['app_helpers'] stretch.
  • confs.php is the responsible for a lot of configurations, like the author, DB login and password, gzip, error handling and other things, including the {url} global var. This is a variable where you set your application path inside the OS, and on the rest of the application, dont need to keep using barbaric techniques like ../../app/views/assets/myfile.js, just {url}/app/views/assets/myfile.js, it even faster for the browser.
  • routs.php file, used to link a application URL to a action inside a controller.
• vendor folder. Only keeps things needed to run, you will not build your application here.
  • core folder.
    • Keeps the classes you will extend on app/*.
  • libs folder. Keeps the Features files.
  • Bootstrap.php file.
    • Does not improve your front-end results. Only dictates some framework behaviours.

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Blitz Framework MVC basic working

Routs

• A route have its behavior set in routs.php, and will look like this:

$this->router->get('/adm/user/cadastro', function (){
      $this->callController('user', 'show');
});
$this->router->post('/adm/user/cadastro', function (){
      $this->callController('user', 'insert');
});

• Notice that the same URL can behave different based on the kind of request.
  • On the example above, we call /adm/user/cadastro on both routs, and in both cases we call the 'user' controller, but a GET request will trigger the 'show' action, and a POST request will trigger the 'insert' action.
• Theres even the possibility to apply standard actions to all urls, like the login credential verification:

$this->router->before('GET|POST', '/adm/.*', function() {
    $this->callController('userLogin', 'isvalidlogin');
});

• This route will intercept every request to a URL containing '/adm' and call isvalidlogin action.

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Controllers

• A controller is composed by one or more methods, called 'actions'. They are called like that because they literally receive 'action' on their name, but its not included when they're called on the route, watch closely, a method called ActionIndex will be called on router only by Index.
• Controllers are the backbone of the framework, they are the ones who call models and views, deciding how and when everyting will be done.
• See below a controller example:

  public function actionShow() {
		// Capture and validate the GET data.
        $this->inputStart($_GET);

        $this->inputAddValidation(array(
            'id' => 'required|integer|min_len,1'
        ));

		// Put the GET data on $data.
        $data = $this->getInputData();

        if (is_null($data)) {
			// outputs the view inside \app\views\pages\index\store-cadastro.php
            $this->outputPage('index::store-cadastro');
        } else {
			// instantiating a model.
            $store = new Store();
            $store->id = $data['id'];
			// outputs the view inside \app\views\pages\index\store-cadastro.php with the data on $store->getData().
			// On the view, this data will be accessible by $store var.
            $this->outputPage('index::store-cadastro', array(
                'store' => $store->getData()
            ));
        }
    }

Using models

• To call a model inside a controller, import and declare it:

\blitz\vendor\core\Model::import('Store');
use \blitz\app\models\Store as Store;

Receiving data from views

• On the example controller, notice that inputStart() and getInputData() are the way to communicate the view with the controller, while inputAddValidation() sanitizes everything before we can work with it, because on server side we dont trust world wide web or js. Thanks to GUMP.
• To load a view and give it the model's data, do:

  $this->outputPage('index::post', array(
                'data' => $order->getDetailsOrder($data['id'])
            ));

• Where outputPage will load the view. Notice that in the example above, we are loading the view post, thats inside index folder, thats why the index:: prefix.
  • Inside this view, we can access the object $data to retrieve the data from $order->getDetailsOrder($data['id']).

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Models

• The models are the manual workers of our framework, created and called for specific needs each, but in general can deliver a great range of tasks.
• The following model, for example, make a query and return values:

public function confirmOrder() {
            $count = $this->getConn()
                    ->select('count(1) as exists')
                    ->from('VIEW_ORDERS')
                    ->where('store_id = ? and id = ?', [$this->store_id, $this->id])
                    ->execute()
                    ->fetchInto($this);

        return $count;
    }

• A model is only called by a controller.
• Do not forget that OOP is a paradigm, not just a syntax.
• Thanks to Salebab/Database for the PDO wrapper with query builder.

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views

• The views are what the name suggests: The HTML to the end user.
• Receive data from the controller by the objects passed from it.
• Its only the page's "body".
• The structure seen on browser is a combination of view and template.
  • The template is the "header".
  • Where we got the tag and import scripts.
  • Is the place for general actions commom to all pages to be applied, like js, modals, etc...

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Author:

• Fernando Batels luisfbatels@gmail.com