Phapp

A simple but scalable object-oriented web application framework.

Hello World

A simple example:

<?php

require_once 'Phapp.php';

class Hello extends PhappView
{
	public function response()
	{
		return 'Hello World.';
	}
}

$app = new Phapp();

echo $app->process( 'Hello' );

Find this and more complex examples in the samples branch.

How it works

The idea is to define a set of view objects that get processed by the main application object.

Every view object inherits from PhappView which has two main methods you should overwrite. The first is request():

public function request()
{
	if( !$_REQUEST['order_number'] )
		return 'Home';

	return null;
}

The purpose of this method is to handle the request and, if required, return a name of another view that should take over.

The first view that returns null will get its response() method called to respond to the request:

public function response()
{
	return '<h1>Hello</h1>';
}

Here's a little graph that shows how everything works together:

            +----------------------------+
            | Name of a PhappView object | <-------------------------+
            +----------------------------+                           |
                |                                                    |
                |                                                    |
+-- Phapp ------|-------+                                            |
|               |       |                                            |
|               V       |                                            |
| +------------------------+           +-- PhappView ---------+      |
| |    Construct object    |  ------>  |                      |      |
| +------------------------+           |    Object derived    |      |
|               |       |              |    from PhappView    |      |
|               V       |              |                      |      |
| +------------------------+           +-- request() ---------+      |
| |    Call request() on   |           |                      |      |
| |       that object      |  ------>  |     Determine if     |      |
| +------------------------+           |      this object     |      |
|                       |              |      can handle      |      |
| +------------------------+    yes?   |     this request     |  no? |
| |   request() returned   |  <------  |                      | -----+
| |          null          |           +-- response() --------+
| |   so call response()   |  ------>  |                      |
| |    to get the output   |  <------  |  Generate output for |
| +------------------------+    html   |     this request     |
|               |       |              |                      |
+---------------|-------+              +----------------------+
                |
                V
           +----------+
           | Web page |
           +----------+

Phapp is very minimal and very small. Just have a look at Phapp.php to fully understand its concept.

Subclass to extend

Subclass Phapp and PhappView to add methods for data base access, internationalization and stuff like that.

It's a good idea to set up a base view which contains common methods and derive your views from that.

PDO support

If you're using PDO's, you may inherit your views from PhappPDOView and call query() like this:

if( ($result = $this->query(
	"SELECT
		first,
		last
		FROM members
		WHERE last_login = ?
		ORDER BY last",
	$lastLogin )) )
{
	while( ($row = $result->fetch()) )
	{
		$contents .= "<li>{$row['first']} {$row['last']}</li>";
	}
}

Stay up to date

It's probably best to add Phapp as submodule or subtree to your project's repository to be able to update fast and easily.