I've been working on Cgiapp in
the past few months, in particular to introduce one possibility for a Front
Controller class. To test out ideas, I've decided to port areas of my
personal site to Cgiapp2 using the Front Controller. Being the
programmer I am, I quickly ran into some areas where I needed some reusable
code -- principally for authentication and input handling.
I've been exposed to a ton of good code via PEAR,
Solar,
eZ components, and
Zend Framework. However, I have
several criteria I need met:
- I want PHP5 code. I'm coding in PHP5, I should be able to use PHP5
libraries, not PHP4 libraries that work in PHP5 but don't take advantage of
any of its features.
- I prefer few dependencies, particularly lock-in with existing
frameworks. If I want to swap out a storage container from one library and
use one from another, I should be free to do so without having to write
wrappers so they'll fit with the framework I've chosen. Flexibility is
key.
- Stable API. I don't want to have to change my code every few weeks or
months until the code is stable.
- I should be able to understand the internals quickly.
So what did I choose? To reinvent the wheel, of course!
To that end, I've opened a new PEAR channel that I'm calling
PHLY, the PHp LibrarY, named
after my blog. The name implies soaring, freedom, and perhaps a little
silliness.
It is designed with the following intentions:
- Loosely coupled; dependencies should be few, and no base class should be necessary.
- Extendible; all classes should be easily extendible. This may be via observers, interfaces, adapters, etc.. The base class should solve 80% of usage, and allow extensions to the class to fill in the remainder.
- Designed for PHP5 and up; all classes should make use of PHP5's features.
- Documented; all classes should minimally have excellent API-level documentation, with use cases in the class docblock.
- Tested; all classes should have unit tests accompanying them.
- Open source and commercial friendly; all classes should use a commercial-friendly open source license. The BSD license is one such example.
Please feel free to use this code however you will. Comments, feedback, and
submissions are always welcome.
