Create your own framework... on top of the Symfony2 Components (part 3)

Fabien Potencier

January 07, 2012

This article is part of a series of articles that explains how to create a framework with the Symfony Components. It is OBSOLETE but an up-to-date version can be found in the Symfony documentation.

Up until now, our application is simplistic as there is only one page. To spice things up a little bit, let's go crazy and add another page that says goodbye:

send();

As you can see for yourself, much of the code is exactly the same as the one we have written for the first page. Let's extract the common code that we can share between all our pages. Code sharing sounds like a good plan to create our first "real" framework!

The PHP way of doing the refactoring would probably be the creation of an include file:

Let's see it in action:

get('name', 'World');

$response->setContent(sprintf('Hello %s', htmlspecialchars($input, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8')));
$response->send();

And for the "Goodbye" page:

setContent('Goodbye!');
$response->send();

We have indeed moved most of the shared code into a central place, but it does not feel like a good abstraction, doesn't it? First, we still have the send() method in all pages, then our pages does not look like templates, and we are still not able to test this code properly.

Moreover, adding a new page means that we need to create a new PHP script, which name is exposed to the end user via the URL (http://example.com/bye.php): there is a direct mapping between the PHP script name and the client URL. This is because the dispatching of the request is done by the web server directly. It might be a good idea to move this dispatching to our code for better flexibility. This can be easily achieved by routing all client requests to a single PHP script.

Exposing a single PHP script to the end user is a design pattern called the "front controller".

Such a script might look like the following:

 __DIR__.'/hello.php',
    '/bye'   => __DIR__.'/bye.php',
);

$path = $request->getPathInfo();
if (isset($map[$path])) {
    require $map[$path];
} else {
    $response->setStatusCode(404);
    $response->setContent('Not Found');
}

$response->send();

And here is for instance the new hello.php script:

get('name', 'World');
$response->setContent(sprintf('Hello %s', htmlspecialchars($input, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8')));

In the front.php script, $map associates URL paths with their corresponding PHP script paths.

As a bonus, if the client asks for a path that is not defined in the URL map, we return a custom 404 page; you are now in control of your website.

To access a page, you must now use the front.php script:

  • http://example.com/front.php/hello?name=Fabien

  • http://example.com/front.php/bye

/hello and /bye are the page paths.

Most web servers like Apache or nginx are able to rewrite the incoming URLs and remove the front controller script so that your users will be able to type http://example.com/hello?name=Fabien, which looks much better.

So, the trick is the usage of the Request::getPathInfo() method which returns the path of the Request by removing the front controller script name including its sub-directories (only if needed -- see above tip).

You don't even need to setup a web server to test the code. Instead, replace the $request = Request::createFromGlobals(); call to something like $request = Request::create('/hello?name=Fabien'); where the argument is the URL path you want to simulate.

Now that the web server always access the same script (front.php) for all our pages, we can secure our code further by moving all other PHP files outside the web root directory:

example.com
??? composer.json
?   src
?   ??? autoload.php
?   ??? pages
?       ??? hello.php
?       ??? bye.php
??? vendor
??? web
    ??? front.php

Now, configure your web server root directory to point to web/ and all other files won't be accessible from the client anymore.

For this new structure to work, you will have to adjust some paths in various PHP files; the changes are left as an exercise for the reader.

The last thing that is repeated in each page is the call to setContent(). We can convert all pages to "templates" by just echoing the content and calling the setContent() directly from the front controller script:

getPathInfo();
if (isset($map[$path])) {
    ob_start();
    include $map[$path];
    $response->setContent(ob_get_clean());
} else {
    $response->setStatusCode(404);
    $response->setContent('Not Found');
}

// ...

And the hello.php script can now be converted to a template:



get('name', 'World') ?>

Hello

We have our framework for today:

 __DIR__.'/../src/pages/hello.php',
    '/bye'   => __DIR__.'/../src/pages/bye.php',
);

$path = $request->getPathInfo();
if (isset($map[$path])) {
    ob_start();
    include $map[$path];
    $response->setContent(ob_get_clean());
} else {
    $response->setStatusCode(404);
    $response->setContent('Not Found');
}

$response->send();

Adding a new page is a two step process: add an entry in the map and create a PHP template in src/pages/. From a template, get the Request data via the $request variable and tweak the Response headers via the $response variable.

If you decide to stop here, you can probably enhance your framework by extracting the URL map to a configuration file.