Here is a brief overview of the system workflow:
Of course the actual system will be a lot more complex due to cross-referencing components, modules, libraries, helpers, but you get the idea. :)
Yesterday I have (sort of) announced the work on the framework based on Kohana and Zend Framework.
It is in early development stage but here is how it performs in Kohana. Granted it doesn’t do much at this stage. The screenshot below showcases the performance of the ‘transparent layer’ support, using the default Kohana profiler.
I will soon post a chart on how the framework relates to and integrates with Kohana and Zend Framework. :)
I have started working on a project which uses both Kohana and Zend Framework. I use Kohana for low level system structure (e.g. MVC) and Zend Framework for higher level components.
What I wanted to do is to create a framework on top of these two great open source frameworks, this way building applications will be a lot easier in the future because I will have all the basic (and advanced) functionalities ready to go. :) In a nutshell, the framework will act as a ‘middle-man’ layer.
One of the goals of my framework is to act as transparent as possible. This means, the user can simply drop the framework at a convenient location, place a hook file in Kohana add it as a normal Kohana module, and that’s it! Let the magic begins!
One major achievement for me today is how I made the framework absolutely transparent. Normally this is how you extend a Kohana library or helper:
class valid extends valid_Core {}
Thanks to Kohana’s cascading file system, it will automatically start looking for ‘valid_Core’ in the modules and system directories.
Now, I wanted to add my framework, and assume my framework has an enhanced version of valid_Core, and I want to use that, what do I do? See below:
class valid extends valid_Core {}
That’s right, it is *exactly* the same syntax as before! You don’t have to alter your existing application in anyway to take advantage of more libraries and helpers. :)
And of course if the library or helper isn’t present in my framework, it will automatically fall back to the Kohana one. And if for some reason you don’t like the enhanced version, you can easily disable them. :)
That’s it for today. In the next few days I’m going to play with the new Kohana unit test library (only available in the SVN repository for now). I wonder how it compares to SimpleTest and PHPUnit.
P.S. The name of my framework is called ‘Layerful’, I will release it in open source license once it’s mature enough. :)
Elliot Haughin, a fellow CodeIgniter user has started writing a book on CodeIgniter. This is now the second book, after CodeIgniter for Rapid PHP Application Development by David Upton.
It is really nice to see the CI community grow. Personally I think the user guide is sufficient for a user to get the feet wet, but I understand some people prefer to have a top-down learning approach.
The book is scheduled to finish by August, according to Elliot.
I always wanted to write about WordPress plugins, it’s like Firefox: it works well out-of-box, but the goodies are all in the plugins (Firefox call them extensions). Some day in the future I’ll probably write about my 40 odd Firefox extensions, but today, let me talk about what plugins I have installed on my current blog. :)
Before I go on talking about the plugins, you should know that this by no means is a complete list of useful plugins even though I have tried much more than what is in the list.
Here it begins, the list is in alphabetic order.
Update: There is now a more recent comparison of CodeIgniter 1.7.1, Kohana 2.3.1 and Yii 1.0.3.
When I was reading through my subscribed feeds I came across this post: Notes on Choosing a PHP Framework: A Comparison of CakePHP and the Zend Framework by Chad Kieffer.
Chad has done a great job comparing the two frameworks that he’s interested in. That inspired me to write something up for the frameworks that I prefer and use. :)
I began hunting for PHP frameworks ever since Ruby on Rails hit the street. Coincidentally one of the first PHP frameworks I played with was CakePHP. At that time CakePHP’s documentation was nearly non-existent so I had to seek for an alternative. I did a lot of searches, and researches, and finally I was happy to see CodeIgniter. Its user guide was what impressed me the most, I am sure many of the fellow CI users would agree with me on this one. Because of the excellent documentation, I was able to start working on projects right after I spent a few hours on the user guide! Developing apps on CI was such a breeze! Today, I develop web applications in CodeIgniter, Kohana and Zend Framework. If you want to find out how to use Zend Framework components with CI or Kohana, please read my previous blog entry: Using Zend Framework with CodeIgniter.
