README

A front controller to put in front of your impossible-to-ever-refactor-into-clean-code codebase/framework.

The primary intention is to slowly and safely migrate away from a legacy codebase and into a new modern approach.

Requirements

Tested against PHP 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 7 and hhvm.

When to use

Use when your application is a terrible mess and your new go-to codebase/framework is fully loaded when it hits the front controller. An example of this could be migrating away from CodeIgniter/Yii to Laravel 5. At the time your clients hit Laravels front controller (router), Laravel already booted up a massive application. The performence hit of booting up the entire framework work only to route it to the old application is too much. Instead put up this library to handle the routing between old and new application until you can remove both this libary and the old application.

Suggested alternatives

Your new clean code dispatches to the old application if the route is not found, because it is fully decoupled and super fast from day 1.

Breaking free of your chains (framework/vendor lock in)

See the examples folder for examples.

Suggested Path of migration

1. Stop building new functionality in your old codebase.
2. Setup a new codebase.
3. Setup the Escapology front controller, feed it the front controller of your old and new code base.
4. Feed the new front controller either a static route file or your new codebases. (take a look at the examples)
5. Routes found in the new code base will be sent to the new code base, any not found will be sent to the old codebase.
6. Migrate the old codebase bit by bit to the new one.
7. When all of the old codebase is gone, remove Escapology and replace it with the real front controller.

The Regex Router

At the moment there is only one kind of router/dispatcher to use, the regex one.

Routes are declared in the following format

    return [
      // Verb, Regex URI
      ['GET', '/'],
      ['GET', '/user/\d+'],
      ['POST', '/user/'],
      ['PUT', '/user/.+'],
      // ..
    ]

Regular use

As described the examples file would look something like this

    require __DIR__ . '/../../vendor/autoload.php';
    $applicationRouter = new Skansing\Escapology\Router\Application(
      new RegexDispatcher($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'], $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']),
      null,
      new \Skansing\Escapology\Cacher\File,
      '_route_cache'
    );
    $routeFound = $applicationRouter->handle(
      __DIR__.'/route.php'
    );
    if($routeFound) {
      // or maybe you are already in the new applications frontcontroller and can go straight to dispatching
      require __DIR__.'/newApplication/index.php';
    } else {
      require __DIR__.'/oldApplication/index.php';
    }

Remember to clear the cache file when new routes are set. If you only have a few routes there isnt much gain to using a cached file, but around the 100-1000 routes the benefits of not having to parse the route files are obvious.

If you want to use it uncached, simply only pass a dispatcher.

Credits

This package regex routing is inspired by Nikita Popov's FastRoute library