Basic PHP MVC Framework

Basic MVC made from scratch, without using existing components and packages

Description

Athough the objective was not to use third party libraries I've included Composer, mainly for having PHPunit available easily, since I wanted to face this challenge with TDD from the begining, knowing the available time was a restriction.

Views

• I decided to use PHP alternative syntax for my templates, it's well suited for using within HTML and doesn't requires an alternative syntax processor.
• I'm using ArrayObject as a base class for the View object. It allows me to save time in implementing the methods for handling key-pair values.
• I implemented toString in Views so they can be used as arguments for others views. This way we can separate layout from content templates.
• I've added the ability to access the arguments in the View that contains them. That way a content view is aware of the context set on the layout.

Router

• I made a very simple class for routing.It only has only one responsibility which is matching a value with a registered route and return its callback. Getting which value is going to be provided to the Router is responsibility of the user, dispatching the callback is not responsibility of the router either.
• The router accepts any kind of callable argument as callback
• The router accepts a path as string and converts it to a regexp pattern to test routes
• It supports arguments in the registered routes with the form /user/{id} and even supports params with custom patterns as /user/{id:\\d+}

Controllers

• Since the router can receive any callable as routes callbacks, there isn't really any need to come up with anything fancy.
• To avoid creating objects unnecessarily, I've created my Controllers as static classes (so they fulfill their callable condition). If I had more time I would have probably come up with a mechanism to instantiate controllers dynamically to avoid static classes.

Models

• Likewise, I didn't have enough time to do something complex with them either. I would have liked to make an auto SQL generator on the base class, but I ended up writing the queries in the models by hand. Nothing wrong with that, but there is nothing reusable either.

Requirements

• php 7.2
• php SPL extension enabled
• the example HTML templates require 'short_open_tag' enabled
• composer

Set up Instructions

• run composer install at the root directory
• create a DB for the project
• import the database-dump.sql file
• config access in the config/Config.php file
• in Apache, add a virtual host pointing to the public folder

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@example.com
ServerName morsum.com
ServerAlias www.morsum.com
DocumentRoot /home/javis/morsum/public
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
<Directory "/home/javis/morsum/public">
   Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
   AllowOverride All
   Order allow,deny
   Allow from all
   Require all granted
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>