Background
I am trying to design a reasonably useful MVC framework from scratch primarilty for my own education before jumping into Laravel/Symfony.
I am trying to implement dependency injection because plan on expanding this framework in the future and I want to keep things modular and maintainable.
Here is the MVC repository: https://github.com/JethroHazelhurst/psr-4-mvc
(Note: the controller/routing system is hard coded for simplicity!)
Here is my flowchart showing how the MVC framework is structured without dependency injection.
As I understand it, the main dependencies are...
Core\Router depends on Foo\Controller
FooController depends on Core\Controller (via the parent::__construct method)
Core\Controller depends on Core\View
Foo_Model depends on Core\model which depends on Core\Database
Questions
So I am a bit confused as to how I should use dependency injection here... for example: How do I implement dependency injection with parent::__constructors (if at all)?
Also, is depending on parent::__construct like this making the framework too tightly coupled?
Many thanks in advance for your considered reply.
You will actually need to implement dependency injection then. Presently there is none; no object are being passed their dependencies. In your constructors, you should be receiving the objects needed for correct execution. It's the basis of dependency injection.
Dependency injection would happen at the bootstrap phase of an application. I think of bootstrap as the action of preparing the environment to actually handle whatever it is called to do, in our case handling a http request.
Generally an index.php only calls a bootstrap.php file. That bootstrap file will route the request to a specific controller, creating dependencies along the way.
Using parent::__construct() is perfectly fine, it's how you will actually pass the objects dependencies. However, you can question why you need it. I don't see why your Controller should extend a core Controller. They actually don't always have the same dependencies, making it harder to manage if you make them all inherit from a base class.
I think you are confusing Dependency Injection and extending classes.
Dependency injection handles external dependencies for a class. This means that if you use one class in another class (using class A in class B, not extending class A) it's a dependency. The dependency container will create the instances automatically and hand them over to the class which needs them.
Further reading here.
I'm currently using Laravel and have a pretty good general grasp now on how the dependency injection and service container works now. I see it working very well when programming to interfaces, but what about concrete classes?
I utilize a service layer between my controllers and models. The point of the service objects was so that I could easily reuse their methods elsewhere, like in a different controller. But there are cases where I also need to use a service inside another service.
So I've been using the constructor for the dependency injection inside my services. The issue I kind of see is that sometimes I only need a service (inside one of my other services) for 1 method. So doing it in the constructor makes it rather large. On the other hand, since I've been setting these parameters in the constructor, I can't simply new-up an instance on demand, since it requires those parameters. For example, let's say I have an OrderService class, and for the constructor, I see two ways I can go about it:
public function __construct(FileUploadService $fileUploadService)
{
$this->fileUploadService = $fileUploadService;
}
or
public function __construct()
{
$this->fileUploadService = new FileUploadService;
}
I've mostly been doing it the first way, but have been thinking about the second. If I ever needed this OrderService somewhere else in the app, I can't simply create a new instance since it relies on the FileUploadService, unless I create a new instance of that too. But you can see that it will start to cascade without the dependency injection, because what if the FileUploadService depends on something also? It's just easier to resolve it out of the container.
Maybe there's something I'm missing, because it almost feels like a catch 22 in some ways. I'd like to note that a majority of these classes I'm injecting are concrete classes, so I don't need to swap them out at any particular point.
I've thought about just creating a new instance in the constructors for each service I need, that way I can also new-up the instance without providing parameters. But I like to follow best practices, so I was wondering what other experienced developers thought about this.
My understanding:
A dependency is when an instance of ClassA requires an instance of ClassB to instantiate a new instance of ClassA.
A dependency injection is when ClassA is passed an instance of ClassB, either through a parameter in ClassA's constructor or through a set~DependencyNameHere~(~DependencyNameHere~ $param) function. (This is one of the areas I'm not completely certain on).
An IoC container is a singleton Class(can only have 1 instance instantiated at any given time) where the specific way of instantiating objects of those class for this project can be registered. Here's a link to an example of what I'm trying to describe along with the class definition for the IoC container I've been using
So at this point is where I start trying use the IoC container for more complicated scenarios. As of now it seems in order to use the IoC container, I am limited to a has-a relationship for pretty much any class I want to create that has dependencies it wants to define in the IoC container. What if I want to create a class that inherits a class, but only if the parent class has been created in a specific way it was registered in the IoC container.
So for example: I want to create a child class of mysqli, but I want to register this class in the IoC container to only instantiate with the parent class constructed in a way I've previously registered in the IoC container. I cannot think of a way to do this without duplicating code (and since this is a learning project I'm trying to keep it as 'pure' as possible). Here are some more examples of what I am trying to describe.
So here are some of my questions:
Is what I'm trying to do above possible without breaking some principle of OOP? I know in c++ I could use dynamic memory and a copy constructor to accomplish it, but I haven't been able to find that sort of functionality in php. (I will admit that I have very little experience using any of the other magic methods besides __construct, but from reading and __clone if I understood correctly, I couldn't use in the constructor it to make the child class being instantiated a clone of an instance of the parent class).
Where should all my dependency class definitions go in relation to the IoC? (Should my IoC.php just have a bunch of require_once('dependencyClassDefinition.php') at the top? My gut reaction is that there is a better way, but I haven't come up with one yet)
What file should I be registering my objects in? Currently doing all the calls to IoC::register() in the IoC.php file after the class definition.
Do I need to register a dependency in the IoC before I register a class that needs that dependency? Since I'm not invoking the anonymous function until I actually instantiate an object registered in the IoC, I'm guessing not, but its still a concern.
Is there anything else I'm overlooking that I should be doing or using? I'm trying to take it one step at a time, but I also don't want to know that my code will be reusable and, most importantly, that somebody who knows nothing about my project can read it and understand it.
Put simply (because it's not a problem limited to OOP world only), a dependency is a situation where component A needs (depends on) component B to do the stuff it's supposed to do. The word is also used to describe the depended-on component in this scenario. To put this in OOP/PHP terms, consider the following example with the obligatory car analogy:
class Car {
public function start() {
$engine = new Engine();
$engine->vroom();
}
}
Car depends on Engine. Engine is Car's dependency. This piece of code is pretty bad though, because:
the dependency is implicit; you don't know it's there until you inspect the Car's code
the classes are tightly coupled; you can't substitute the Engine with MockEngine for testing purposes or TurboEngine that extends the original one without modifying the Car.
It looks kind of silly for a car to be able to build an engine for itself, doesn't it?
Dependency injection is a way of solving all these problems by making the fact that Car needs Engine explicit and explicitly providing it with one:
class Car {
protected $engine;
public function __construct(Engine $engine) {
$this->engine = $engine;
}
public function start() {
$this->engine->vroom();
}
}
$engine = new SuperDuperTurboEnginePlus(); // a subclass of Engine
$car = new Car($engine);
The above is an example of constructor injection, in which the dependency (the depended-on object) is provided to the dependent (consumer) through the class constructor. Another way would be exposing a setEngine method in the Car class and using it to inject an instance of Engine. This is known as setter injection and is useful mostly for dependencies that are supposed to be swapped at run-time.
Any non-trivial project consists of a bunch of interdependent components and it gets easy to lose track on what gets injected where pretty quickly. A dependency injection container is an object that knows how to instantiate and configure other objects, knows what their relationship with other objects in the project are and does the dependency injection for you. This lets you centralize the management of all your project's (inter)dependencies and, more importantly, makes it possible to change/mock one or more of them without having to edit a bunch of places in your code.
Let's ditch the car analogy and look at what OP's trying to achieve as an example. Let's say we have a Database object depending on mysqli object. Let's say we want to use a really primitive dependency indection container class DIC that exposes two methods: register($name, $callback) to register a way of creating an object under the given name and resolve($name) to get the object from that name. Our container setup would look something like this:
$dic = new DIC();
$dic->register('mysqli', function() {
return new mysqli('somehost','username','password');
});
$dic->register('database', function() use($dic) {
return new Database($dic->resolve('mysqli'));
});
Notice we're telling our container to grab an instance of mysqli from itself to assemble an instance of Database. Then to get a Database instance with its dependency automatically injected, we would simply:
$database = $dic->resolve('database');
That's the gist of it. A somewhat more sophisticated but still relatively simple and easy to grasp PHP DI/IoC container is Pimple. Check its documentation for more examples.
Regarding OP's code and questions:
Don't use static class or a singleton for your container (or for anything else for that matter); they're both evil. Check out Pimple instead.
Decide whether you want your mysqliWrapper class extend mysql or depend on it.
By calling IoC from within mysqliWrapper you're swapping one dependency for another. Your objects shouldn't be aware of or use the container; otherwise it's not DIC anymore it's Service Locator (anti)pattern.
You don't need to require a class file before registering it in the container since you don't know if you're going to use an object of that class at all. Do all your container setup in one place. If you don't use an autoloader, you can require inside the anonymous function you register with the container.
Additional resources:
Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern by Martin Fowler
Don't look for things -- a Clean Code Talk about IoC/DI
I am using Zend_Log, and other required classes, without the MVC framework. I want to add Zend's logging capabilities (and other modules in the future) to my custom classes and I am wondering what the best approach is for doing so.
Right now I have a wrapper for the Zend logger so, presumably, I can access it globally:
My_log::log('Testing', Zend_Log::INFO);
Should I be adding this code to each method in my classes that I want to log? Should I not create logs inside my classes? Is there a smarter way?
I appreciate the help,
DC
Dependency injection container seems like a great solution if your app can be integrated. All static calls cause issues in testing environment.
have look around this doc
http://components.symfony-project.org/dependency-injection/trunk/book/04-Builder
Worst case i would create a static getter like My_Log::get()->error("message"); the only point is that now you will be able to easily fix the test environemnt to make get return a fake instance. All your My_Log needs is a setLogger($logger) which will replace the static instance with a mock or whatever. Any way static calls are bad :/ if possible try to decouple classes so they would depend on as few classes as possible. Even injecting logger manually into your class constructor is a better idea. If you have MVC action plugin or a base controller could provide lazy loading getLogger() so your code could do $this->getLogger()->error('...');
art
How to solve the problem of composing a Controller class in PHP, which should be:
easily testable by employing Dependency Injection,
provide shared objects for end programmer
provide a way to load new user libraries
Look down, for controller instantiation with a Dependency injection framework
The problem is, that derived Controllers may use whatever resources the programmer wants to (eg. the framework provides). How to create a unified access to shared resources (DB, User, Storage, Cache, Helpers), user defined Classes or another libraries?
Elegant solution?
There are several possible solutions to my problem, but neither one looks to be a elegant
Try to pass all shared objects by constructor? (may create constructor even with 10 placeholders)
Create getters, settters? (bloated code) $controller->setApplication($app)
Apply singletons on shared resources? User::getInstance() or Database::getInstance()
Use Dependency Injection container as a singleton for object sharing inside the controller?
provide one global application singleton as a factory? (this one looks very used in php frameworks, hovewer it goes strongly against DI principles and Demeter's law)
I understand, that creating strongly coupled classes is discouraged and banished for :), however I don't know how this paradigm applies to a starting point for other programmers (a Controller class), in which they should be able to access shared resources provided to the MVC architecture. I believe, that breaking up the controller class into smaller classes would somehow destroy the practical meaning of MVC.
Dependency Injection Framework
DI Framework looks like a viable choice. However the problem still persists. A class like Controller does not reside in the Application layer, but in the RequestHandler/Response layer.
How should this layer instantiate the controller?
pass the DI injector into this layer?
DI Framework as a singleton?
put isolated DI framework config only for this layer and create separate DI injector instance?
Are you developing a framework yourself? If not, your question does not apply, because you have to choose from already existing frameworks and their existing solutions. In this case your question must be reformulated like "how do I do unit testing/dependency injection in framework X".
If you are developing a framework on you own, you should check first how already existing ones approach this issue. And you must also elaborate your own requirements, and then just go with the simplest possible solution. Without requirements, your question is purely aesthetic and argumentative.
In my humble opinion the simplest solution is to have public properties which initialize to defaults provided by your framework, otherwise you can inject your mocks here. (This equals to your getters/setters solution, but without the mentioned bloat. You do not always need getters and setters.) Optionally, if you really need it, you may provide a constructor to initialize those in one call (as you suggested).
Singletons are an elegant solution, but again, you must ask yourself, is it applicable in your case? If you have to have different instances of the same type of object in your application, you can't go with it (e.g. if you wish to mock a class only in half of your app).
Of course it is really awesome to have all the options. You can have getters/setter, constructors, and when initialization is omitted, default are taken from a singleton factory. But having too many options when not needed, is not awesome, it is disturbing as the programmer has to figure out which convention, option and pattern to use. I definitely do not want to make dozens of design decisions just to get a simple CRUD running.
If you look at other frameworks you will see that there is no silver bullet. Often a single framework utilizes different techniques depending on the context. In controllers, DI is a really straightforward thing, look at CakePHP's $helpers, $components variables, which instruct to inject appropriate variables into the controller class. For the application itself a singleton is still a good thing, as there is always just a single application. Properties less often changed/mocked are injected utilizing public properties.
In case of an MVC, subclassing is perfectly viable option as well: just as AppController, AppView, AppModel in CakePHP. They are inserted into the class hierarchy between the frameworks's and all your particular Controller, View and Model classes. This way you have a single point to declare globals for your main type of classes.
In Java, because of dynamic class loaders and reflection, you have even much more options to choose from. But on the other hand, you have to support much more requirements as well: parallel requests, shared objects and states between worker threads, distributed app servers etc.
You can only answer the question what is right for you, if you know what you need in the first place. But actually, why do you write just another new framework anyway?
Singletons are frowned upon when Dependency Injection is viable (and I have yet to find a case where a Singleton was necessary).
More than likely you will have control of instantiation of controllers, so you can get away with the mentioned $controller->setApplication($application), but if necessary you can use static methods and variables (which are far less harmful to the orthogonality of an application than Singletons); namely Controller::setApplication(), and access the static variables through the instance methods.
eg:
// defining the Application within the controller -- more than likely in the bootstrap
$application = new Application();
Controller::setApplication($application);
// somewhere within the Controller class definition
public function setContentType($contentType)
{
self::$application->setContentType($contentType);
}
I have made of a habit of separating static and instance properties and methods (where necessary, and still grouping properties at the top of the class definition). I feel that this is less unwieldy than having Singletons, as the classes still remain quite compact.
How about refactoring?
Granted that was not one of your options, but you state the code is a largely coupled class. Why not take this time and effort to refactor it to more modular, testable components?
As far as I understand, the Application class of yours should be the dispatcher. If so, I would rather use the controller constructor to pass an instance of the Application, so the controller would know who's invoking it. At later point if you want to have a different Application instance depending on whether the code is invoked from within CLI, you can have an ApplicationInterface which the Application\Http and Application\Cli would implement and everything would be easy to maintain.
You could also implement some factory pattern to get a nice implementation of the DI. For example, check the createThroughReflection method here: https://github.com/troelskn/bucket/blob/master/lib/bucket.inc.php
I hope this makes sense.
Regards,
Nick
You could also use a ControllerFatory in which you would give to your Application or Router/Dispatcher
Sou you could call $controllerFactory->createController($name);
Your Application would have no idea how to create your controllers the Factory would. Since you ca inject your own ControllerFactory in to your DI container you can manage all dependencies you want depending on the controller.
class ControllerFactory {
public function __construct(EvenDispatcher $dispatcher,
Request $request,
ResponseFactory $responseFactory,
ModelFactory $modelFactory,
FormFactory $formFactory) {
...
}
public function createController($name = 'Default') {
switch ($name) {
case 'User':
return new UserController($dispatcher,
$request,
$responseFactory->createResponse('Html'),
$modelFactory->createModel('User'),
$formFactory->createForm('User'),...);
break;
case 'Ajax':
return new AjaxController($dispatcher,
$request,
$responseFactory->createResponse('Json'),
$modelFactory->createModel('User'));
break;
default:
return new DefaultController($dispatcher, $request, $responseFactory->createResponse('Html'));
}
}
}
So you just need to add this factory in your DI container and pass it to your Application.
Whenever you need a new controller you add it to the factory and if new dependencies are required you give them to the factory through your DI container.
class App {
public function __construct(Router $router,Request $request, ControllerFactory $cf, ... ) {
...
}
public function execute() {
$controllerName = $this->router->getMatchedController();
$actionName $this->router->getMatchedAction();
$controller = $cf->createController($controllerName);
if(is_callable($controller, $actionName)) {
$response = $controller->$action(request);
$response->send();
}
}
}
This is not production code, I haven't tested, but this is how you decouple your controllers from your application. Notice here though that there is one bad coupling here because my controller return's a response and I execute the response in the App. But like I said this is just a small example.
It is usually a good idea to pass factories for Models, Forms, and Controllers to their respective parents, because you will end up loading all your object Graph at bootstrap time wich is really bad and memory consuming.
I know this answer was already approved, but it's my 2 cents on the subject
There is a good article on the subject
http://miller.limethinking.co.uk/2011/07/07/dependency-injection-moving-from-basics-to-container/