Is there a way to create a command line tool which will help extensively in building an application.
For example, say I have a zend project and I want to add a whole new admin module based on some predefined patterns.
I run:
$ myzf create admin-module-framework
Which would then setup (as per a predefined template):
The module, models, views, controllers, actions, helpers, plugins, and even create a sql file to go with that.
Of course, I wouldn't be looking for something which simply copies certain files to certain directories (I can do that myself). I'd be looking for something which will actually modify the code to fit in with the app (based on some predefined variables).
Possible? Worth the effort?
Thanks!
See http://blog.stuartherbert.com/php/beyond-frameworks/ for a series of articles where Stuart creates such a system.
Related
When should we use multi-module structure (instead simple structure) in php Phalcon?
I have found some multi-module skeleton, such as:
https://github.com/ovr/phalcon-module-skeleton,
https://github.com/phalcon/mvc/tree/master/multiple.
But I don't know should i use this multi-module structure in a project instead use multi projects.
Something i can think about it is: more complex configuration, complex folder structure, my web url be longer (/[module]/[controller]/[action]) and , importantly, performance will be low (for more loading things than).
However, I think that there are something interesting with it (so many ITer had used it). Is there Someone can give me advantages, disadvantages and criterias for selection.
P/s: the same problem with Zend2 Module!
If you are building a single purpose application as an API that does not use Views, you should rather use single module structure. If it will be a realy simple API of for example storing/logging, micro app will do aswell.
Multi module application structure is useful if you are willing to build more complex solutions. For example an public application with public content, but with admin panel. This one would be handy to write in multi-module to separate administrative controllers/views from those public ones.
My habit is to use multi-module structure, because mostly I have to build applications that are CRM's with their API and an public accessible content part (eg. docs). For such purpose it's just handy to create such modules as:
frontend - for controllers accessible by everyone
backend - for controllers accessible after authentication and authorisation like administrative things
API - for API purposes ;)
common - a part I rather am willing not to implement, but in one project I'm forced to put here some abstract controllers that will be extended in other modules.
This way you can keep separate services configuration for each module, what saves you from cutting off things that you are using at purpose of module A, but not on module B. Like authentication part - important for backend, but useless for frontend part. Or Database configuration - slaves for frontend, master for backend, etc. So this may be also a performance-wise solution for big projects.
Update
Sometimes "multi-project" is an option including "multi-module" project ;) It strongly depends on what you are trying to achieve. Eg. if you take API apart, it may be easier to scale it over multiple instances, but at first it costs you an efford to configure separate project.
If system is supposed to be single-server instance or every istance should be absolutely independed on other instances, single multi-module project will be enough - lets say a standar CMS, blog platform, even simple browser game or homepage of mobile app including API for it. But if you are building a whole universum of apps like an internal API to privide content, CRM to manage it and a couple of web pages to serve it, keeping these as separate projects will be easier to manage later.
Well for example I in my application im splitting every functionnality - for example i have model Link - it's splitted to seperate module to have nice application structure where each funtionality is seperated module. It's like less classes to load in loader. Beacause you only need models and routes from each module to load for whole app, and you load other things like librarys/controllers/helpers/services in module.
With our little developer team, we are currently working on a web project quite sensitive. We use Git as version control system.
Also, we're using the MVC pattern, so our files are separated into 3 parts (views, models, controllers). We are using the laravel framework so our views is a combination of PHP, HTML, Javascript and CSS code.
For some views, the Javascript and CSS code are directly into the view.
Now, the project is growing and we need someone to help us to do some beautiful pages with CSS. But his objective it's only to deal with CSS and nothing else.
Regarding tools that we are using, is there a way (or some best practices to apply) to give him an access to do correctly his job without give him all of our sources?
I'm thinking of tools, code refactoring, or anything else that can help us to keep our business logic away of external people.
If you want to only give him access to part of the project, but still have his updates automatically reflected on your build, you could go for a solution using get submodules.
If he will really be dealing with CSS only, then make the public folder as a separate repository, and have it included in yours as a submodule. If he needs to have access to the HTML as well, which is very likely, make another for the views folder. While he still gets access to the view logic, that's probably not a big problem.
Use git and make a new repository for static pages and give the external people access of only static pages repository
I have been looking into incorporating an asset management/pipelining tool (probably Assetic) into my PHP project.
Since assets can be grouped into collections or wildcard-based paths using such tools, if I wanted to set up a watch process that re-compiled/minified only those source files that had changed, how would I do that given that assets have to be looked up by name (see example below)?
(I noticed that for Symfony there's a watch task for Assetic but I'm not sure that it re-compiles only the changed file(s) and also I would have to make it work outside of Symfony since my app uses the CodeIgniter framework.)
In Assetic, you can create a wildcard-based asset, e.g.:
new GlobAsset('/path/to/compass-sources/*')
You can tell it to send the assets through a filter (Compass in this example) and then output the result (CSS) to a folder like public/css.
Let's say I set up the watch process using node.js's fs.watch so that I can theoretically tell Assetic to re-compile a particular asset whenever one of its source files changes.
Since my node.js script would only know the name of the actual file that changed (e.g. compass-sources/layout.scss), how could I look up which AssetCollection or GlobAsset that particular file belonged to (say an asset called global-styles) in order to recompile it?
I'm open to alternatives here. I looked at grunt and may very well use grunt-contrib-watch to handle the file watching, but I like the idea of using Assetic because the project is in PHP and I think that will be easier on future PHP developers working on the system who may not be familiar with node.js. It seems grunt take a different approach where assets don't necessarily go in named bundles. Mostly I want to understand the conceptual approach of named asset bundles (like in Assetic) as it relates to my goal of recompiling assets whenever the source files change.
I'm starting to familiarize myself with using the module-based architecture for zend framework projects. My real reason behind being interested in the module architecture is to be able to take a module from one project and just drop it into another project. Maybe I'm not getting it right..
But what I'm noticing right off the bat is that controllers within each module cannot have the same name as any other controller in the main application (or in any other module, though I haven't tested this). This leads me to think that modules are not really independent self-contained units, so I wonder how this affects their ease of distribution from one project to another.
The other issue is what if I were to take a module and drop it into another project. Do I have to update the .zfproject.xml manually? and wouldn't that be a bit too cumbersome to be done manually?
Maybe I'm not clear on how modules should be used in zend, so I'd like to know when you decide it's best to use them, and when do you decide not to use them, or do you use them all the time, or do you never use them?
I always used module based architecture so far in my projects, because I like to separate concepts. For example I have always an ADMIN module whose classes and controllers dont mix with the rest of the application. Using modules you can reuse modules for other applications, for example if you create a BLOG module.
The names of your controllers will be something like Admin_IndexController for the admin module even if the file is named IndexController.php.
Another concept that is nice and help you reuse resources is the plugins. Use them for authentication or to check validity of the requests.
You need to setup namespaces for your modules so that they are easily moved into a new project without renaming.
If you are using Zend Tool then you will have to edit the zfproject.xml. I haven't spent a lot of time using this so I'm not sure if there is another way without manually editing.
I have way too many modules in my application. Currently my modules are namespaced, but what I'd like to do is have a directory structure so I can get rid of this redundant and annoying namespacing.
For instance, for modules named "xModule1, xModule2, xModule3", I'd like to have a directory structure like this:
-x
-module1
-actions and templates
-module2
-actions and templates
-module3
- actions and templates
Surely the developers at symfony know that people would like to use their framework to develop large applications. So how is module organization like this done?
I've done a lot of work in Java/Spring, and because source is component scanned, you can arrange your controllers and jsp files in nicely organized hierarchies. Is this somehow possible with Symfony?
No, this is not possible with Symfony. The structure of your modules and their actions and templates is expected in a fixed file system layout and I haven't heard anything about that changing.
I've run into the same problem you're facing where a very large site ended up with 30+ modules in a single application. At first it seemed cumbersome but after dealing with it for a while I found that the single location to search for a specific module was in fact beneficial instead of having to guess through sub-structures until I got what I was after. Seeing that structure grow and grow also pushes me to respect adding new modules only when it's absolutely necessary, folding new functionality into existing modules and refactoring existing modules to work with new enhancements whenever possible.
Symfony does have auto-loading features that will work for your library folders however, allowing you to have lib/one/two/three/Object.class.php or any other structure you see fit.
If you have so many modules, you could consider to move some functionality into plugins (i.e. create your own plugins).
The benefit is that you can use this functionality also in other projects.
Or you can group your modules into applications. You can have as many applications as you want, not only backend and frontend.
I've wondered about the same thing, especially as many configuration files need to be set either at application level or individual module level. It could useful to be able to cascade configurations to a set of modules.
As mentioned above, it seems the available solutions are:
deal with lots of modules
create separate applications (which will create some wieldy duplication)
refactor your modules to be as efficient as practical (i.e. multiple controllers & views per module)