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Simple MVC for PHP

blog.devartis.com

17 pointsfara11 comments

The result looks extremely close to what I end up writing using CodeIgniter (http://codeigniter.com). You should give it a spin sometime.

To me, CodeIgniter felt less bloated than CakePHP (which is also an excellent framework, just not my style). CodeIgniter seems to stay out of the way more, and aside from having to initially rely heavily on the documentation, the framework is laid out in a way that makes sense.

Ever used Delicious.com, Yahoo! Answers or Yahoo! Bookmarks?

Then you've used a site built on the Symfony MVC framework. Make sure you check that out as well.

http://www.symfony-project.org/

I will definitely consider CodeIgniter for my next PHP project. It seems like a very good alternative to CakePHP and I definitely like a framework that tries to stay out of my code as much as possible. Thanks for the suggestion

CodeIgniter is a very entry level framework. You get up and running quickly but by the time you're halfway through building your site it starts to annoy the hell out of you. Go with Kohana (version 3) instead. Its quite easy to get up and running with, isn't bloated and comes with a very good ORM (ActiveRecord based) that takes care of 95% of the CRUD functionality.

No offense to Kohana3, but the documentation I found is a little bit confusing/incomplete/weak etc. (http://kohanaframework.org/guide/)

True. However, if you take a moment to look at the actual framework code it's pretty self explanatory. Nowadays my first port of call is the framework source before I Google or search anywhere else.

Also consider Kohana. CodeIgniter has something of a problem in that the devs aren't really updating it much these days or considering community suggestions. They've gone a fair ways recently to try to fix this problem, but a lot of good devs have given up and moved on.

Kohana broke off from CodeIgniter long ago, and has since embraced PHP 5.3 (No more $this->something->something_else->some_function() spam all over the place). It's nowadays a pretty different creature from CI, and IMHO far superiour.

We looked at lightweight frameworks and went with Yii (http://www.yiiframework.com/). CodeIgniter is getting a bit long in the tooth. Yii is a modern object oriented framework.

Yii uses demand loading of classes to avoid the performance problems of object oriented frameworks which load all the files off the disk for every request (see http://talks.php.net/show/froscon08). And it uses prepared statements for SQL, improving performance and avoiding SQL injection attacks.

It's nice for simple applications, but lately has been growing to include other features.

I like http://fuelphp.com these days, it's like CodeIgniter (by some of the same people), but modernized. I liked Kohana too for a while, but they seem way to architect-y (the docs where never up to date, things kept changing etc.). Hope Fuel doesn't go there.

FWIW, Kohana just recently released updated docs with examples, explanations, tutorials, and the whole lot.

Actually though, I kind of enjoyed the "architect-y" part of Kohana - it encouraged me to actually dig into the source code to figure out how things work, which made me far more comfortable with the framework, and much more able to work with and extend it.

I like that your approach is clean, yet configurable. Then again, most web-friendly languages already have a grip of MVC frameworks to choose from. Nice proof of concept, but I don't think your blog post would convince someone who didn't use MVC to give it a shot, like the conclusion seemed to suggest.

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