Toccata

Toccata is a PHP MVC framework intended mostly for practice and learning. It's kind of like a playground were I can try new ideas, practice some coding, test different patterns, etc. Maybe in the future I could expand it a little bit and add some way of teaching through it, or even it could be used in some app as a real framework, but for the moment it's just that, a playground.

The explanation for the name is simple: Toccata is never going to be as good nor as big as Symfony.

Notice: This framework uses features of PHP 7, so it's not made to support older versions.

Installation

For the time being, just clone the repo and create a vhost pointing to its root

git clone [email protected]:paulmdorr/toccata.git

Usage

Router

You can create simple routes (no regex at the moment) by filling the config file routes.json in the project root.

The route format is:

"route": ["NameOfController", "NameOfMethod"]

The default method is index, so the following is a valid routes.json file:

{
  "/": ["MainController"],
  "/testPage": ["MainController", "test"]
}

The router will try to find the route among the JSON keys and, if found, try to call the method (defined in "NameOfMethod", or index as default) from the controller (defined in "NameOfController"). If any of these actions fails, a simple 404 page will be shown and a warning will be written in the warnings log.

Controllers

If the Router path resolution works, it will be calling a method in a Controller defined by you. For the moment, Controllers are simple clases that extend from the base class Controller, like so:

class MainController extends Controller {
}

You should define some methods also, which will be called by the Router:

class MainController extends Controller {
  public function index() {
    echo "Index";
  }

  public function test() {
    echo "Test!";
  }
}

Anything you print on the controller's methods will be printed on the page, but to do things the right way you should probably use...

Renderers

At the moment of writing this README, the base class Renderer just has a simple method called, well... Render. It takes an array with options as the only argument, and each Renderer that extends from the base class can use this options as they please. I know, not extremely useful, but it's enough for me as a start.

There are two simple Renderers shipped with Toccata:

• PlainRenderer is mostly for testing purposes, but in the future it will probably be aimed to be a PHP-based renderer, without any kind of template language.
• JSONRenderer is what you've already guessed, and if you haven't, well... think harder, it'll come to you.

Whenever you want to use a Renderer from a Controller, you can do it like this:

$this->getRenderer('Plain')->render([
  'template' => "This is the value of 'param1': «param1»!",
  'params' => ['param1' => 'index']
]);

I'm thinking about adding support for other template languages (like Twig or Mustache), but the main idea is to write the Renderer base class so anyone would be able to add their own template/renderer.

Models

This is still a WIP, nothing to see here, move along!

Security

It has NONE!

I mean, at least for the moment. But I will surely add some code related to this in the future, so stay tuned!

Collaborating

Are you sure that you want to collaborate with THIS? Well, it's your time, I guess!

Don't hesitate to contact me at paulmdorr.me/contact if you have suggestions or questions. Also, feel free to create a new issue or make a pull request!