I wrote Mana about a year ago and used it for a project on Upwork. It was...okay. Using it for a real application pointed out some of the flaws and gave me some things to think about. I knew where improvements could be made and so it was time to get to work.
I had the idea for bitraq a while ago but I didn't have the time to waste on personal projects - it just wasn't a luxury I could afford, Mana was a necessity...but sometimes it's hard to suppress that need to bring your ideas to life!
So, learning from some of the problems I had with Mana -- I decided to throw this together. It's a lot cleaner and tighter. Using it to build bitraq has been a far more pleasant experience - I don't want to take Mana down because it was something I enjoyed writing and think it's still a fairly decent project.
I've designed it so that the page templates can include CSS - we can add styling using:
[CSS[
.some-style {
...
}
]CSS]
These blocks are extracted from the templates and compiled and inserted into the HTML document, we can do similar with JavaScript:
[JS[
some code
]JS]
Then, in our layout:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<style>
<!-- collected CSS blocks are compiled and expanded here -->
[[CSS]]
</style>
<script>
<!-- collected JS blocks are compiled and expanded here -->
[[JS]]
</script>
</head>
This works pretty well, I've also ensured that the CSS and JS code are eval()'d in php so we can use variables and other php goodies within these blocks - allowing for fairly complex and dynamic code to be generated for the front-end.
This has been awesome since a template is now more like a self-contained component, it's a nice way to work. Some might not like that a huge chunk of CSS will be inlined into their document - you can still include a .css file directly if that's what you want. But in terms of speed it's one HTTP request less at the end of the day.
For bitraq I have a main .css layout that contains site wide styling, and each individual page loading components with their own embedded CSS and JavaScript, so it's relatively clean and easy to manage and maintain projects.
When I'm done with bitraq I'll upload the completed project and that will give a full demo on how it all works together, but it's a lot nicer than Mana and I'm happy with it, I'll be using it again for sure.
The templating engine is just better all-round, having put more thought into the design. I separated much of the functionalty out so it's cleaner and more modular.
I uploaded this class a few days ago because it's useful just on it's own. There were odd isssues with Mana and how I was defining/creating table schemas - it was more complex than it had to be and tightly coupled with other modules within Mana, which was bad!
Yeah, I ued a lot of singletons and static classes in Mana, seemed like a good way to go at the time but cracks did start to show when the project got larger.
That's gone - I've also added a batching system that allows a single request to queue up multiple actions for execution, it's running really well and offers far more flexibility than Mana did - so definitely a huge improvement and I'm pretty pleased with how it's performing.
Should probably give some background, here. Bitraq is sort of like Stack Overflow but with a twist. Rather than request help with something code-specific, bitraq allows you to define new projects, you add a project - a link to the repo, some info about the project and from there you can produce bug reports for those projects.
These reports can then be viewed by other members, the report will tell you about a specific issue with an application, and how to reproduce that issue for yourself.
Users can then offer solutions to the problem and the user can accept an answer that solves the problem - in this case the user who answers gains a point on their reputation.
So it's a similar merit-based platform, but a way for people to collaborate and solve issues/bugs with existing applications or applications they're currently working on.
Aside form that, it acts like a typical social media site, you can add friends, message other users, etc.
I'm in that final 20% bit where it's kinda...ugh! But almost there and happy with the progress. I'm going for MVP - not so concerned about aesthetics and fancy bells and whistles for now, it looks nice and is fully responsive as it is which is important, but once it's fully functional I'll spend more quality time on the UI.
Suggestions, criticisms - contributions? Have at it, it's all good.
Will keep this updated as I go, but anyone is free to tinker with this code as they wish I really don't mind.
I'll do my best to knock some documentation together when I get time, I intend to continue developing this framework - once bitraq is complete I intend to add API functionality, for now it's serving full HTML pages but I want to be able to use it for fetching JSON objects. I wrote Bricktop a while ago which was my effort in dabbling with building a front-end, JavaScript framework, lot of fun and learnt a lot, but learnt more since so there's room for improvement - maybe one day I'll be developing projects using my own stack! How cool would that be?
Will update as often as I can - been busy as hell the past few months and neglected my github, need to be a bit more selfish with my time I reckon! Excpect to see more regular activity over the coming months.
Michael.