Hi everyone,
Since I keep showing up late for answering questions tagged php where i actually know the answer i figured i'd try asking a question myself.
I've been working on so many complete rewrites of a custom template engine in php for so long and so many times that i thought i'd ask for opinions.
In short, this is the most important part i have implemented so far:
- Any http request is routed to handler.php
- based on the requested URL a controller is instantiated and a method on that controller is called.
- The controller method must return an
IViewcompatible class instance (IViewdefines aRender()method)- The template engine does some xpath for every namespace that ends in 'serverside'
sprintf('//%s:*[@runat="server"]', $namespaceprefix ) - For every found tag, it looks up the php class identified by
$tag.localNameand instantiates one and attaches it to the original template. - Once attached, the original template node is fed to the 'ServerTag' so it can initialize properly
- the fully complete IView compatible instance is assigned to a temporary variable in the controller method.
- The template engine does some xpath for every namespace that ends in 'serverside'
- The controller asks pushes data from a Model class to the view which does some nifty xpath DOM replacement.
- The controller returns the completely filled view to
main()the handler, which renders it.
I am basing my template on xml. a simple template currently looks like:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:red="http://www.theredhead.nl/serverside">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>Title will be filed by the View depending on the Controller</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/Stylesheet/Get/Main/" />
</head>
<body>
<!-- the entire body may be reset by the view using it, using XPath and DOM functions -->
<!-- Usually the PageHeader and PageFooter would be put back after clearing the body -->
<div id="PageHeader">
<img src="/Image/Get/theredhead_dot_nl.png" alt="Site Logo" />
</div>
<h1>www.theredhead.nl :: Test Template</h1>
<p>
Lorum ipsum dolar sit amet. blah blah blah yackadee schmackadee.
</p>
<div id="PageFooter">
Built by
<br />
<red:UserProfileLink runat="server" Username="kris" />
</div>
</body>
</html>
At current, this outputs (including the broken indentation):
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:red="http://www.theredhead.nl/serverside">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
<title>Welcome to my site</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/Stylesheet/Get/Main/"/>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/Stylesheet/Get/Custom/"/>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/Stylesheet/Get/Profile/"/>
</head>
<body>
<!-- the entire body may be reset by the view using it, using XPath and DOM functions -->
<!-- Usually the PageHeader and PageFooter would be put back after clearing the body -->
<div id="PageHeader">
<img src="/Image/Get/theredhead_dot_nl.png" alt="Site Logo"/>
</div>
<h1>www.theredhead.nl :: ModelViewController</h1>
<p>
Lorum ipsum dolar sit amet. blah blah blah yackadee schmackadee.
</p>
<div id="PageFooter">
Built by
<br/>
<div><div xmlns:profile="http://www.theredhead.nl/profile" class="ProfileBadge" style="font-size : .8em;">
<a style="text-decoration : none; border: none;" href="/Profile/View/kris">
<img style="float : left;" src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/5beeab66d6fe021cbd4daa041330cc86?d=identicon&amp;s=32&amp;r=pg" alt="Gravatar"/>
 Kris
</a>
<br/>
<small>
 Rep: 1
</small>
</div></div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
- I've only touched on the tip of the iceberg here and yes, I will be stripping unused xmlns attributes from the output once I'm happy with the functionality
- there are currently just over 200 classes in my mvc and core frameworks
- I am aware there are existing solutions that can do similar things, but I want to build my own.
So the big question is: Do you have any input on must-have functionality?
Thanks in advance for any and all input.
Kris
P.S. if anyone is interested in the complete source-code, please leave a comment, I will be providing it on my site when I reach reasonable developer usability levels.