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To Use a PHP Framework or Not? [closed]
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Closed 9 years ago.
I need to create the server part of my mobile application.
The server part consists of registering a user to the server by making a simple http post request (json) from device to server and saving the users credentials to database (mysql).
Some http post requests from the devices , stating to the server in which kind of events they want to be subscribed (my server keeps data of some events).
Send push notifications , to my devices from the server when a new event is generated (already have the php scripts for that).
For a kind of server likes this , do i need to use a php framework? In this page i found a list of different frameworks. I found this page while reading php tutorials and some of them suggested using a php framework.
But what are these frameworks for? Do i need to learn/use one? When are they needed. Are they for front-end sites?
Thank you for reading my post :)
Frameworks are created to make your work easy.
Advantages of using framework
There are a lot of functions that are already written
There are some good programic patterns. You have good code and file organisation.
There are a lot of libraries and plugins.
There is MVC pattern already implemented.
They give you advantage of faster develompent.
There is community support
They are mostly fast and secure.
Why use a framework with PHP?
Why do I need to use a popular framework?
Using framework in the begining may seem to be hard, but when you learn it, it makes coding a lot faster!
Disadvantages of using framework:
You will learn a lot by writing your own.
If you need it for small project like portfolio, there is no need for giving yourself more work to set the framework to work.
There is a lot of things in framework that you don't need and they take its space on server.
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/49488/when-not-to-use-a-framework
It's not about frontend project, if you have big project you should use framework if it's little it's not worth. That is my opinion.
I'd suggest you Zend Framework or Symfony if you decide to use Framework.
I recently have the similar project requirement for a REST based application on PHP. We choose Zend Framework 2 which have REST supported architecture. I check out same support on Symfony 2. So One thing i get it that Framework gave you standrized way of code/architecture + set of tools. If I decided for core php application, then obviously I need to write a REST based API Server architecture. Which is already available in case of Frameworks.
Related
I am working on a ERP system that is 6 years old and it is developed in raw PHP maintaining procedural coding structure without OOP or any Framework.
Finally our management decided to re-write the application with upgraded technologies. We will write the application in Laravel Framework. Database will be Oracle and Mysql both. In the front end we will use Angular 4.
The confusion is should i use Angular 4 for front end request handling and data binding? Or i should go with Javascript/Jquery. Last few days i am seeking some suggestions on the net. I found some also. My question is, how should i integrate Laravel and angular? should i go for API based approach maintaining two different project for Laravel and Angular or angular inside Laravel in a folder? If i go for API based approach, will my ajax request increased? The database of the application will be too large.
will API based approach make data loading slower?
All the request in the application will be ajax based and there will be no page refresh approach, but url will change on request.
Please suggest me the possible right solution to help me taking the right decision.
Angular 2/4+ has been designed to build SPA (Single Page Application). If you deep dive into angular then it will be clear to you that all the structures and conventions followed in the angular 2+ architecture are optimized for SPA.
So, if you want to use Angular with Laravel 5+ then I think the best way would be to use angular to build a standalone frontend application and use Laravel 5+ as a backend. That means laravel will act as an API server and a backend of the application.
Using laravel as an API server doesn't necessarily mean your database will be bigger. It is actually upto you how you design your application.
But, there is an another good solution.
You can use VueJs. There is a build in support for VueJs within Laravel 5+.
The benefit of using VueJs is that you can use it just like Jquery. That means you don't have to create separate standalone application for VueJs like Angular.
But, you can use it, page by page basis. It is loosely coupled.
You will get most of the benefit of Angular from it.
You can also use React.
You can use Angular 4 to rewrite your application. Fontend as Single Page Application and Backend exposing REST API will help you to build a good performance application.
I prefer to keep Angular and REST API separate as they should be independent to each other. REST APIs should always be generic so that they can be consumed by other applications too.
Yes, there will be lot of API calls to server. You can scale your REST APIs according to your number of requests. It is better building micro-services to ensure most of the services will not be impacted in case of lot of heavy load (at least part of application will be running). It will help you in future maintenance also.
I want to build an app using ExtJS 4 and PHP.
I will follow the MVC pattern with ExtJS 4.
However, I want to use RESTful webservices with PHP.
Yet I am not sure how to proceed.
How can I call for Web Services that are PHP functions?
How am I going to give the directory like structure to my links?
You can obviously use Ext.Ajax.request() to craft any RESTful URls that you want. However, be sure to check out the REST proxy that's built into Ext JS's data package. By connecting this to your store/model, you can dynamically generate RESTful URLs which can be used for the vast majority of your generic CRUD operations.
RE: the PHP side, that's a big question. Fortunately, there are literally a billion turtorials on creating RESTful services in PHP, so I'd dust off your Google-fu and start there. Here's a very simple introduction that just happens to use PHP: http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/a-beginners-guide-to-http-and-rest--net-16340
You are most likely looking for Ext.Ajax.request.
There are some examples of Ext.Ajax.request from this stack overflow article.
I just want to ask, does it make sense to use both a PHP backend MVC structure, mixed with a front end js MVC structure?
My question arises from building a web application in CodeIgniter, I've begun working with websockets and nodejs so a lot of my interactions to the front end don't even touch php. Currently though the only way to change content in my database is to go through CI via ajax calls.
Is there any advice and how to create and maintain both MVC structures? or should this be avoided.
As you already said: CodeIgniter is a MVC framework. As you're using BackboneJS you won't need the VIEW-part of CI and the MODEL-part won't be needed that much.
You could use CodeIgniter as a simple API backend that handles as a middleman between your frontend and the database (there are very good xmlrpc libraries for CI out there!) or you could go for a REST-specific framework like Recess (http://www.recessframework.org/), try this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/238125/best-framework-for-php-and-creation-of-restful-based-web-services
Short answer: your php-backend would just serve as a API-provider which is used by BackboneJS, so you could use any framework as long as it fits your needs - and CodeIgniter seems to do that.
Tip: you can just delete the libraries and helpers from CodeIgniter that you won't need for you API.
I'm writing an iPhone app as a hobby project and it will need a web service to provide it with data. It's not very different from what I do at work, but at work I only write views and controllers. Someone else is responsible for writing the model and usually the clients provide the web service.
I have done some web programming before, back when everyone were using MySQL and PHP, so my skills are a bit outdated, but I'm confident that I would be able to pull it of using the techniques I already know. However, I don't want to waste my time using obsolete tools. I've figured out that the state of the art would be to write a REST API. I was thinking that there should be some pretty good frameworks out there that pretty much just gives you a REST API with CRUD functionality as soon as you've defined a model.
I guess my question is: What would be the fastest way to get a REST API up and running? I really just want to focus on writing the iPhone app and not spend too much time on this API. It would be great if I could get web administration and revision history too. I should also add that the API isn't supposed to be public, so support for authentication would be great as well.
Just to be clear. I wouldn't mind a PHP framework. In fact it could possibly be better since I know that my current hosting supports it.
EDIT:
The links below which apparently were good for 3 years are no longer working so I went and found a couple of new tutorials that I think are going to stick around for a while. These are on the Ray Wenderlich site, a very well respected ios dev tutorial site. The first article actually references the broken links below but it is complete within itself:
How To Write A Simple PHP/MySQL Web Service for an iOS App
and the second one has a little twist to it. It used parse.com on the backend and AFNetworking. Both of which are quite excellent.
How To Synchronize Core Data with a Web Service – Part 1
I have fixed the broken links below by finding the articles in the way back machine. People seem to like the links so I will keep them. The links above should provide more food for thought.
I am doing exactly the same thing with my iphone app. I found this article on building a RESTful API in PHP:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130910164802/http://www.gen-x-design.com/archives/create-a-rest-api-with-php/
and there is also a followup article here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130323001500/http://www.gen-x-design.com/archives/making-restful-requests-in-php/
with a link to source code at the bottom of the article.
I have programmed a REST API in ZEND Framework using the Zend_Rest_Controller, on the iPhone I used ASIHTTPRequest. My experience with both where good. At the beginning I had some trouble setting up ZEND and connecting it to mySQL, but once I figured out how to do it I was able to write the API very quickly. I can share more information with you if you have any further questions.
EDIT: There seems to be no official documentation on Zend_Rest_Controller. This link describes how to use it to create your API. You simply have to disable rendering in the init() of your subclass and implement the methods for each REST call.
Just to let you know:
I ended up using Ruby on Rails.
EDIT: Since this answer has been downvoted for not providing the reason behind choosing Ruby on Rails and also no instructions on how to write a REST API with it, I thought I would give you my motivation and some simple instructions.
I started reading a book about Ruby on Rails and realized that all I needed to do was to use scaffolding and I got a JSON REST API for free.
Here's a good guide to get you started: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html
When you have your Ruby on Rails environment up and running, creating your REST API isn't harder than running:
$ rails generate scaffold Post name:string title:string content:text
(Example from the above link.) I also found that Rails is very easy and free to deploy to heroku, which meant that I didn't have to pay for hosting for my very basic, low traffic, REST API. There are many other reasons why I am very happy to work with Ruby on Rails, but that's beyond the context of this question.
I followed a quite simple tutorial for creating RESTful APIs with PHP:
Corey Maynard - Creating a RESTful API with PHP
The main concept includes:
one abstract class that handles the parsing of the URI and returning the response, and
one concrete class that consists of just the endpoints for the API.
What about Python?
I'd use Python, Django and Piston.
I'd generate Django models from your
existent DB using inspectdb.
Add the Django admin to your models.
Add Django Piston to your app.
Profit.
With no experience with Python or Django probably it'll take you a day to develop this solution and all code is unit tested and proved to work.
If you want to use PHP I recommend using the CodeIgniter framework with Phil Sturgeon's REST server:
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/working-with-restful-services-in-codeigniter-2
https://github.com/philsturgeon/codeigniter-restserver
Checkout the following PHP class that follows MVC.
http://www.phpclasses.org/package/5080-PHP-Implement-REST-Web-services-servers.html
Hope this helps.
If you already know PHP, there's nothing wrong with a PHP/MySQL backend. You can send all responses in iPhone-compatible plist xml format, and instantly turn the response into a NSDictionary/NSArray/NSNumber data structure with this short snippet of code:
NSString *response = [request responseString];
NSData* plistData = [response dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSPropertyListFormat format;
NSString *errorStr;
NSDictionary* plist = [NSPropertyListSerialization propertyListFromData:plistData
mutabilityOption:NSPropertyListImmutable
format:&format
errorDescription:&errorStr];
I also use the ASIHTTP package for forming URLs, sending asynchronous requets, and receiving the responses, I highly recommend it:
http://allseeing-i.com/ASIHTTPRequest/
You should use whatever languages you are comfortable with for the web service. Any language that can formulate REST responses to requests is fine.
That said, if you want to get something running quickly, I suggest using Python on Google App Engine. It's free and you can use Java instead of Python if you so desire. App Engine supports authentication using OpenID and/or Google Accounts (not sure if they're mutually exclusive) so that should make things easier to code.
As far as making the requests on the iOS device, I suggest using ASIHTTPRequest.
Another option is restSQL, an ultra-lightweight persistence framework. See http://restsql.org. It supports MySQL and PostgreSQL and runs in a standard Java EE container, e.g. Apache Tomcat.
restSQL is a very unconventional data access layer. restSQL is not an object-oriented view of the database. It presents flat or hierarchical "views" of relational database tables. These views are query-able and updatable through a simple REST-based HTTP or Java API. The HTTP interface is based on REST principles, which use HTTP’s built-in features, rather than abstracting away from them.
You want a 'REST API with CRUD functionality' and that's exactly restSQL's sweet spot. You could do this with no code. Simply define your SQL Resources via XML files and start doing HTTP calls against them with full CRUD capability.
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It's hard for me to imagine a php script that is more than a few hundred lines of code. It seems that, for a non-persistent environment, web-based scripting is usually done is small chunks and used for the purpose of delivering a portion of a website to the end user. I'd like to know if people are developing any type of large, or persistent, or complex apps with php, and what is it exactly you are working on. I've only done small projects for small websites, so I don't know what can be accomplished on a larger scale. It would also be nice to know what libraries you are using, and what other technologies you are integrating with. Please enlighten me so I can start to dream of bigger things!
I would look at some of the well-known open source web apps that use PHP to get a good sense of what can be accomplished, and how PHP is used in each of them. The advantage is that since they are all open source, you can actually look at the PHP code to see how various functionality was implemented.
Some good examples to look at include:
WordPress
TextPattern
MediaWiki
PhpBB *questionable code quality
SugarCRM
Joomla
Drupal
Also look at some of the popular frameworks to see what kind of functionality they offer (this should give you a good sense of what types of things PHP is most often used for):
Zend Framework
CakePHP
CodeIgniter
Symfony
For my day-job we run everything in PHP - our front-end website, our backend for agents and employees, inventory, server control interfaces, etc. These are everything from spiffy new AJAX-enabled Zend Framework apps to legacy code that we haven't ported yet. On top of that we use things like Mantis (bug tracking built in PHP), Mediawiki, and phpMyAdmin.
The only thing that isn't PHP are vendor apps because vendors love Java. The one ASP.NET application we have was actually abandoned by the vendor during the project (not really a knock against ASP.NET, that app was just the perfect definition of a runaway project and would have failed no matter what language it was written in).
With mature frameworks like Zend Framework, CodeIgnitor, and CakePHP creating just about anything in PHP is possible.
The biggest problem developing large scale programs is definitely keeping them maintainable in the long-term. Initially, a program starts out all full of ideal methods and ideas, but keeping the integrity intact, especially, over time fails, in my opinion, more often than not.
In addition, scope creep is your enemy. You HAVE to reign that in ASAP.
As far as large scale programs go the company I work for has a few internal programs constantly under development. One example is our proprietary website engine. It's a very large code-base that includes a dozen modules (user management, survey system, blogs, user galleries, etc) that allows us to build our clients sites rapidly.
We also develop our own internal project management program for managing our clients work.
You should definitely be thinking in terms of scale in the long term. In almost every project I've worked on there's a permission/group element for users involved. You might want to start thinking about the possibilities and issues involved in that and work up to more complicated functionality.
MediaWiki is one of the largest public PHP apps, and it's got very nice code. . I know some larger ones, but they're utterly awful and you'd learn nothing by reading them.
There are lots of complex OpenSource php applications. For example, the Drupal CMS, which can be considered a platform in its own right for developing other web sites.
You can browse through the source code online: http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc.py/drupal/drupal/
+1 for Wilco
I have a software I use for some of my clients, it's a CMS, Blog, eCommerce beast, the code base is HUGE, but everything cooperates with each other nicely.
My company works on educational software. We've recently started doing web-based content delivery, including video and audio, with the backend written entirely in PHP using MySQL. We have two primary apps, one which lives on our servers and one which is delivered to the customer. One clocks in at ~42,000 lines of code (using a physical line count) and one at ~68,000 lines.
We use PEAR extensively and a recently started project is using the Zend Framework.
We use PHP at our company. (We do online language learning: http://www.livemocha.com. You should go take a look at the site. Yes, it's sort of a shameless plug, but it's also topical. :-) )
I can't give you a precise number of users, but we put out a press release a while back celebrating hitting the 3 million mark. That's a pretty large scale as web apps go.
We build on the CakePHP framework, which is based on an MVC architecture... at least in theory. In practice, they auto-generate certain methods for the models which tend to have the result of pushing some pieces of model code (caching, deciding which DB to use) into the controllers. They also have a few localization issues in 1.2 that make me think this part of the framework hasn't really reached maturity yet. That said, I find CakePHP pretty comfortable to work with overall, and you should at least take a look at it if you're considering implementing a large-scale web app in PHP. It has some excellent documentation available as well (google for "CakePHP bakery").
Get CodeIgniter and rebuild Amazon or Ebay. If you can dream it you can build it in PHP but you might not be able to maintain it because it is so easy to created bad code that works. PHP.net is your friend. Whatever framework you use make sure your read the User Guide and let it guide you.
I can't believe nobody has mentioned the MVC pattern yet. IMO, it's one of the best things you can use to help you maintain large codebases.