[Phrame-devel] A few comments

[Ross K. <ro...@po...>]

Hi Arnold and anyone else here.

I've been playing with Phrame. I plan to spend more time on it when I'm
able to because I really think its on the right track as a general
purpose PHP framework.

Here is a couple comments for what they're worth. I'm new to this so feel
free to take them with a grain of salt but ...

1)
It seems a pity to me that every request into the controller results in
an additional request via an http redirect. There are speed issues with
this for people on slow connections and it obviously increases the
server hits. I think we need the option for the controller to simply
output a view directly as part of the original http request. I haven't
thought through the best and cleanest way of doing that but I think it
would make for smoother flow in cases where it makes sense to do so.

2)
I think there needs to be a version of the Hello demo that doesn't use
XML and XSLT. I like XSLT (although I'm new to it) but I'm afraid we might
lose newbies at their first look because of two reasons. People coming
from the typical 'throw it together and mix up your PHP and HTML' world
but looking for a better way might immediately open index.php and see all
this 'funny XML stuff' and decide its not for them. Also I think a lot of
low cost hosting doesn't have the Sablotron library compiled into PHP so
if they proceed they'll get a function not defined error and at that point
it might all seem too difficult. I know its not included the default
RedHat 8 install because I spent some of yesterday recompiling my PHP to
get it.

I can probably modify the existing demo to do something with direct PHP
variables. I'll try to look at that in the next few days. My idea of how
the Hello demo should work if we addressed my first comment is probably to
have only index.php. I don't think phrame.php would be needed. Even the
first page goes through the controller, probably getting a default uri,
and the controller outputs the correct view by way of some sort of include
rather than a redirect.

Cheers
Ross