megan-mvc

Overview

A simple MVC framework for building web pages, implemented in PHP. I have started developing it in 2015 to collect a variety of best practices that I developed over a decade or so of PHP development. I picked it up again recently to refresh my skills.

Framework

• The project is completely self-contained and does not rely on any framework (Laravel, Zend, Symfony, Cake, etc.). Why write it all from scratch? It's more fun and you learn more that way!
• There is only a single php file in the doc root, it is index.php, and this file only contains a few lines that invoke the framework (fw.php) which is located outside the document root for better isolation.
• The framework relies on the NGINX try_files directive to send all URIs which don't correspond to an existing file to the index.php.
• The framework supports a model-view-controller (MVC) design pattern. The control logic is in the controller, the data comes from the model, and the presentation of the web page is handled in the view.
• The framework parses the URI into one or more directory names and the file name, which corresponds to a PHP class name. For example: FW_ROOT is the directory containing the framework. If the URI is /xxx/yyy/zzz then the path to the class file is FW_ROOT/controllers/xxx/yyy/zzz-controller.php and the class name is XxxYyyZzzController. Depending on the controller, it may invoke a model. The path to the class file is FW_ROOT/models/xxx/yyy/zzz-model.php and the class name is XxxYyyZzzModel. Similarly the controller may invoke a view. The path to the class file is FW_ROOT/views/xxx/yyy/zzz-views.php and the class name is XxxYyyZzzView.
• Supporting classes are found similarly. For example, the Cookies class is in FW_ROOT/classes/Cookies.php.
• The PHP autoloader feature is used to find the class files, removing the need for explicit require or include statements.
• The MVC classes rely heavily on object-oreiented class inheritance. For example the View class does most of the work for generating a web page. Pages like the /login page are implemented by the LoginView class which extends View.

Database

• The framework supports CRUD database operations. Originally it used mysql but I recently switched to mariadb with few changes required.
• There is a singleton DbConn class that allows multiple classes within a page to share a common DB connection.

Presentation

• The front end code is built upon Bootstrap for CSS/presentation and JQuery for javascript/interactivity. In this day and age modern front end projects tend to be built on a javascript framework such as Angular or React but I find these are overkill for a relatively simple set of web pages.