Posts Tagged ‘framework’

I’m pleased to announce the release of the next major version of Rauma, 4.0.

Rauma is a full-stack PHP framework that gives you database, templating, session, authentication and many other functions out of the box. It’s the framework behind many of Worfolk Online’s websites.

Not much as changed in the 4.0 release, but it gets a major version bump because it’s a breaking change. Here’s what you need to know:

Authentication has been overhauled. The auth service now includes an isLoggedIn function to be a bit more verbose than checking for data. More importantly, you can now extend the base Authorisation class and create your own. This allows you to cache more data, connect to other services and implement persistent logins.

We’ve also deprecated the user description field, in favour of the new attributes feature that was added in version 3.6.

Two other things to be aware of:

There are now a set of proxy objects for things like JsonResponse so that you don’t have to import them from a different namespace.

This bumps the PHP version requirement from 5.6 to 7.1. This allows us to bring in a load of cool new stuff, including a far more up-to-date version of PHPUnit.

It’s available now on GitHub and Packagist.

Photo credit: Brett Donovan.

Ember.js is a JavaScript framework for creating “ambitious web applications” apparently. What that translates to is a JavaScript framework that allows you to get started quickly and have URL-based apps.

It is under heavy active development at time of writing so means that there is plenty of new stuff but also means that the documentation can quickly get out-of-date, so it might take a bit of time fiddling around to get it bootstrapped up and up-and-running. There is a helpful Chrome plugin that fits into the Developer Tools too, though most of the time I spend time looking at the standard console.

Once you are ready to go, things are easy to build. It uses Handlebars, or at least a Handlebars style syntax, so if you have used Handlebars, or even Mustache before then you will probably have a basic idea of what you are doing. You can then layer up pages within each other to build complex applications that can all be bookmarked.

It is designed to work out-of-the-box with Ember Data, which provides instant support for a REST API. If you do not have a REST API, Ember.js claims it is easy to adapt to something else, though I’m sceptical that it is as easy as they claim. It seems to work best if you build the app, and then create a standard REST API to work with it.

I have implemented some simple embedded Ember.js apps for my photo gallery as well as working with it for some more complex projects elsewhere. It is a fun framework to work with, but the documentation is a little parse and it is not quite as flexible as I would like. See the Ember.js website for more information.

Slim is a PHP micro framework, similar to Flight, Silex and Limonade, not to be confused by the Ruby templating system of the same name. It claims to contain “everything you need and nothing you don’t.”

If functions like you would expect a micro framework to work. Here is the standard example.

<?php
require 'Slim/Slim.php';
$app = new Slim();
$app->get('/hello/:name', function ($name) {
    echo "Hello, $name!";
});
$app->run();
?>

My favourite part of Slim, however, is actually the Slim Extras bundle which doesn’t ship with it, but can easily be downloaded and dropped in. This adds easy integration for lots of different templating languages – notably Smarty, Twig and Mustache.

So, for example, if you wanted to integrate Twig, just grab the Extras bundle, the Twig bundle, include the relevant file and change your initialisation statement to the following.

$app = new Slim(array("view" => "TwigView"));

That’s all – now you’re away and can call the render method with a filename and data array to render a template using Twig.