README

Just another MVC framework

===========

The goal: to create a lightweight framework that allows web entities to be rendered and served back to an HTTP client.

The result: Pandora, a small package that simplifies creation of dynamic web pages by assuming things about where your site's assets live.

Set-up

Take a composer dependency on pandora-mvc:

{
    "require": {
        "zutto/pandora-mvc": "dev-master"
    }
}

Configure

Provide Pandora with the runtime configuration it needs in your index.php:

PageDispatcher::registerLoader( $your_autoloader_for_controllers );
PageDispatcher::registerLoader( $your_autoloader_for_models );

EnvironmentFactory::setConfigFile(dirname(__FILE__)."/conf/environment.json");

FrontController::render(DEFAULT_PAGE, DEFAULT_ACTION);

The 3 parts:

1. A classloader for your controllers (and models)
2. A path to your JSON configuration directives that will provide runtime config
3. A call to FrontController::render

Serve

Your controllers will simply be generic classes where each method is mapped to a page.

When a page is requested, the lifecycle looks like this:

1. The appropriate controller is loaded according to the autoloader you've configured
2. An instance of it is created and injected with a Request and Model objects
3. An appropriate view is loaded according to the Accept-Type of the request
4. The page method is called and its return value is exposed to the view
5. Viola!

Example

Here's an example of a controller for an operation that gives a formatted date:

class TimeController {
    protected $request;

    public function __construct( Request $request ) {
        $this->request = $request;
    }

    public function format() {
        $fmt = $this->request->get('format', 'You must specify a date format');
    
        return array (
            'timestamp' => date($fmt)
        );
    }
}

If you've set up a configuration like the one in the section above, TimeController::format() will be called whenever someone sends a request to:

index.php?page=time&action=format

By accessing that URL, Pandora will execute the format method and try to load a view file in views/time/method.html.php--or method.json.php if the request specified application/json as the Accept-type.