Create your First Tiny MVC Boilerplate with PHP

Here is a nice little library much similar to that used in CodeIgniter. I have this saved in application/libraries/Input.php and is included (or required) in my core.php (I use core.php instead of tinyMvc.php).

_get);

$this->_post = $_POST;
}

function get($var = NULL)
{
if( array_key_exists($var, $this->_get) ) {
return $this->_get[$var];
} else {
return FALSE;
}
}

function get_all($var = NULL)
{
return (array)$this->_get;
}

function post($var = NULL)
{
if( array_key_exists($var, $this->_post) ) {
return $this->_post[$var];
} else {
return FALSE;
}
}

function post_all($var = NULL)
{
return (array)$this->_post;
}
}

To use, add $this->input = new Input(); to your __construct() method in Controller and you’ll be able to do this within your controller:

$id = $this->input->get(‘id’);

$username = $this->input->post(‘username’);
$password = $this->input->post(‘password’);

This Input.php library also makes it quite easy to sanitize data on the fly (one reason why you might go this direction instead of directly accessing $_GET and $_POST and sanitizing them later). Lastly, this handles query strings and posted form data and is not to be confused with function arguments specified in the URI requiring assistance of .htaccess (e.g. yourapp/index.php/controller/arg1/arg2)

A bit fast :D but a perfect example for beginners!

An object relational mapper of sorts would be highly suitable for something like this. You’ll have to be careful to test them thoroughly for performance issues. I recently discovered serious limitations with ActiveRecord and DataMapper (both on CodeIgniter) throwing memory exhaustion errors. That eventually led me to consider alternative solutions ranging from writing database libraries from scratch to writing an MVC platform from scratch.

Haven’t tested its limits yet, but I was able to implement this in just a couple minutes into tinyMvc:

http://www.phpactiverecord.org/projects/main/wiki/Quick_Start

Of course there are others out there if you search for ORMs for PHP. Optimizations are good at these early stages when your MVC hasn’t had a chance to get real bloated yet.

Jeff,

That was a simple yet cool tut.

Would you consider extending it into a mini series? I think some of us would benefit in seeing how you would further extend the framework to include useful methods.

Thanks.

thanks for the tutorial (:

Nice Nelwyns!!!

Bravo!!!

I would to see more!

nicce!! Make more video tutorials on this mvc plz! :)

Another vote for building on top of this to create a series. Seems like a great direction to go for applications that aren’t a good fit for a pre-built system like wordpress of drupal and also aren’t complex enough for a full-on framework.

Great tutorial!

Added a routing class to evaluate the urls to determine the method in the controller class to use. Hope it will be of use to someone.

It assumes the url is like this: http://yourdomain.com/tinyMvc/method/param1/param2/..
It can also handle: http://yourdomain.com/tinyMvc/method/param1/param2/?va1=somethinf&var2=something..

Add this to the constructor of the controller class:

$this->router = new Router();
$the_route = $this->router->get();
eval($the_route);

And then create this class:

class Router {
function get()
{
//APP_BASE_URL is a constant i set for the framwork. It is the full url to the
//root folder of the framework
$my_url = $this->str_replace_once(APP_BASE_URL, ”, $this->getfullurl());

//This removes the query string part of the url so that it can be evaluated
if($_SERVER["QUERY_STRING"]) {
$my_url = $this->str_replace_once(“?” . $_SERVER["QUERY_STRING"], ”, $my_url);
}
$my_url = $this->trimTrailingSlashes($my_url);
$requestURI = explode(‘/’, $my_url);
$function = $requestURI[0];
$parameters_str = ”;
for($i = 1; $i ‘.$function.’(‘.$parameters_str.’);’;
} else {
return ‘$this->index();’;
}
}

//THESE FOLLOWING FUNCTIONS ARE JUST HELPERS

function str_replace_once($str_pattern, $str_replacement = ”, $string){
if (strpos($string, $str_pattern) !== false){
$occurrence = strpos($string, $str_pattern);
return substr_replace($string, $str_replacement, strpos($string, $str_pattern), strlen($str_pattern));
}
return $string;
}

function trimTrailingSlashes($str){
$str = trim($str);
return $str == ‘/’ ? $str : rtrim($str, ‘/’);
}

function getfullurl(){
$s = empty($_SERVER["HTTPS"]) ? ” : ($_SERVER["HTTPS"] == “on”) ? “s” : “”;
$protocol = substr(strtolower($_SERVER["SERVER_PROTOCOL"]), 0, strpos(strtolower($_SERVER["SERVER_PROTOCOL"]), “/”)) . $s;
$port = ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] == “80″) ? “” : (“:”.$_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"]);
return $protocol . “://” . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] . $port . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
}
}

you could also add a .htaccess file to the tinyMvc folder with this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|css|js|images)
RewriteRule ^(.+) index.php/$1 [L]

Great tutorial and funny tutorial image!

Great tutorial, well done. I would love if you could expand it a bit as you said.

More MVC! More!

Man nice tutorial, would love to see more of this or added to the market at least.

Good job mate!