[Phrame-devel] ideas

[Arnold C. <arn...@ya...>]

Hi Everyone,

I would just like to start by saying thanks to those
that have posted ideas and are interested in getting a
community formed around Phrame.  Phrame started as a
solution to the problem of developing/maintaining a
large PHP project at work.

I would like to start by addressing some things I have
come across in reading comments about Phrame on
various PHP websites.

1. Phrame was initially "based" on the "design" of
Struts but was never intended to be a direct port. 
PHP and Java are like apples and oranges.

2. I intend for Phrame's evolution to be guided by the
Phrame community, not necessarily the Struts
community.

3. The Struts "design" was sound and seemed like a
good starting place for Phrame's development.

Whew... that said, I would like to start a discussion
on some ideas I have for the future.  These are just
ideas at this point meant to spark some conversation
for future development.

1. All subsequent versions of Phrame will be released
under the LGPL license instead of the GPL (thanks
Kaede Rokawa).

2. I am not sure I want to keep the "utils" classes. 
They are very Java-ish and I don't intend on trying to
recreate the Java Class Library.  Perhaps utilizing an
existing class library such as Eclipse
(http://www.students.cs.uu.nl/people/voostind/eclipse/)
would be a better idea?

3. The current design is not as efficient as it could
be because every request into the controller results
in an additional request via HTTP redirect via a call
to the PHP header() method (thanks Ross Keatinge).  I
modified a local copy of Phrame to output the view
directly as part of the original HTTP request.  This
change resulted in a new ActionView class that
contained a display() method.  From an Action's
perform() method I would return an ActionView object
to the ActionController.  Then in the index.php file I
would get a reference to the ActionView object from
the ActionController and call it's display() method. 
This change shouldn't affect Phrame's ability to use
various display technologies such as Smarty, XSLT,
Flash, etc.

4. I also wanted to point out an easier way of
handling the mappings array.  The current example uses
the following structure:

...
_ACTION_FORMS => array(
    'form' => array(
        _TYPE => 'HelloForm'
    )
),
...

This could be simplified into the following
structurally equivalent syntax:

...
$mappings[_ACTION_FORMS]['form'][_TYPE] = 'HelloForm';
...

5. I would also like to deprecate the Xml::marshal()
method in favor of PHP's WDDX serialize/deserialize
methods.


Well, thats all I can remember for now but I'm sure
there is enough to get a conversation started.  :)

Thanks,

Arnold

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