Over the last two years we’ve been developing our php micro framework. It came out of the need for more concise theming and mashing up data sources. This lead to the development of Erdiko. It’s an MVC micro framework that facilitates lean stacks and cool mash-ups. Our moto is, “Enterprise Glue.”
We developed a simple yet powerful framework to get work done quickly yet maintain efficiency on the server. Unfortunately too many of the large php frameworks suffer from performance issues. Its typically caused by code bloat and or too much automagic happening. For some projects this is great, for others it just gets in the way.
MVC
On the view side, Erdiko supports standard php templates, markdown and handlebars. On the controller side we package all our content to rendered through a Response object and theme and/or structure the data according to your needs. A rest api or ajax request does not need a themed page wrapper for instance. Structured json is preferred.
Here is an example of a coding simple page. It sets the page title and renders a single view in the page body. A controller method like, getHello() might look like this:
$this->setTitle(‘Hello World’);
$this->addView(‘examples/index’);
The model layer is the mash up layer. We actually don’t include much code here intentionally. The models should be based on what your project is trying to accomplish. We don’t want to assume we know your data better than you do! We will be adding support to pull data from Drupal, Magento and WordPress. If you need an ORM or MySQL connector use Doctrine, Zend Models, or whatever works best for you. We’ve used a number of data models in the past with erdiko. Its great to be able to leverage some of the great PHP you already know. We will be writing more blog posts to show you architectures and code styles that help you make a clean mash up. We’re talking about sound engineering here, not some frankenstein monster 😉
Router
The router is based on ToroPHP which borrows the conventions from Tornado (popular Python framework). We have the guts or Toro (single file framework of only 125 lines) underneath erdiko. We mantain compatibility with toro yet extend it to meet the needs of erdiko.
All of the routes are defined in a simple json file with a concise syntax that supports expressions. There are also hooks that can be used before and after controller requests
Closing
The framework is a culmination of years of software writing and working with both start ups and large enterprises. It’s a work in progress but we use it in production and are constantly improving it. We’ve tried a lot of different techniques and architectures, with the latest version of erdiko we did some serious rewrites and made something we’re proud of.
I hope you find it useful. Please give us feedback, fork it, remix it, and contribute back.
Check out more at http://erdiko.org/
