Presentation of FOF, rapid

1. Framework on
Framework (FOF)
Rapid component development

2. What is FOF?
Or, rather, what's it not?

3. Not a fork of another framework
(or trying to sell you a fork of your favourite CMS...)

4. Not the best thing since sliced bread

5. Not A Real Framework
(NARF)

6. FOF extends the Joomla! MVC API
It does not replace or undermine it

7. FOF is licensed under GNU/GPL
Note: it’s GPL version 3 or later

8. Design goals
• DRY - Don't Repeat Yourself. Copying & pasting code is
the source of all evil.
• Write less, do more - less code, less failure points
• It should never impose its own way of thinking. Gets
out of your way when you want to work around it.
• Backwards compatibility - no surprising, quantum
changes every few days
• Joomla! version abstraction (1.5, 2.5 and 3.0 supported)

9. Key features
• Convention over configuration, Rails style
• Use a query builder, even on Joomla! 1.5
• HMVC today, not in 3 years, without relearning component
development
• Easy reuse of view template files without ugly include()
• Automatic language loading and easy overrides
• Media files override (works like template overrides)
• Automatic JSON and CSV views with no extra code
• Automatic Joomla! version template overrides (e.g. default.j30.php)

10. Overview of a component
• The Dispatcher is the entry point. It will setup, run and render
the MVC view
• The Controller is a thin interface to push data to the model state
and instantiate views
• The Model is the workhorse. Business logic goes here.
• The Table class is a hybrid data adapter, controller and model
(following J!'s convention)
• The View fetches model state data and renders them in a
meaningful way
• The Toolbar handles the rendering of titles, buttons and so on

11. Convention over configuration in
Models
• Tables are named as #__component_view, e.g.
#__todo_items
• Auto increment field is named component_view_id,
e.g. todo_item_id
• Magic fields: enabled, created_by, created_on,
modified_by, modified_on, locked_by, locked_on,
hits
• You can override defaults without copying & pasting
code, ever. Copy & paste is the devil!

12. Convention over configuration in
Controllers
• Default tasks (not RESTful!): browse, read, edit, add,
delete, save, apply, ...
• Customize with onBeforeMethod and onAfterMethod
methods, e.g. onBeforeSave. Don't copy & paste code.
• All MVC objects can be passed a $config array to
customize them. It "flows" from dispatcher to
component to model and view.
• FOF guesses the task if it's missing based on plural/
singular view name and existence of ID in the query

13. Convention over configuration in Views
• Views inherit from FOFView and its specialized
children, e.g. FOFViewHtml
• Customize using the onTask methods, e.g. onBrowse
• The toolbar is handled outside the view, in a
FOFToolbar descendant class. Override it with a
toolbar.php file in the component's root.
• Magic toolbar methods, e.g. onItemsBrowse allow you
to customize the toolbar without copying & pasting
code.

14. HMVC
• Include the results of component views anywhere
(other views, other component, modules, ...)
• FOFDispatcher::getTmpInstance(‘com_foobar’,
‘items’, array(‘layout’ => ‘fancy’))->dispatch();

15. Reuse view templates
• Load a view template from another view,
component, ...
• echo $this->loadAnyTemplate('site:com_foobar/
item/form');

16. Language loading and overrides
• Automatically loads component language files
(frontend and backend)
• Hierarchical language overridding
‣ English loads first
‣ Current site/user language loads next and overrides English

17. Media files overrides
• Load media files like this:
FOFTemplateUtils::addCSS('media://com_foobar/
css/frontend.css');
• Media overrides are inside the template folder, e.g.
templates/tpl_example/media/com_foobar/css/
frontend.css

18. Automatic JSON and CSV views
• Just add format=json or format=csv
• JSON: You have an instant JSON-based remote API
for your components
• CSV: You can quickly export whatever you see in the
backend to Excel, Numbers, LibreOffice, Google
Docs, etc.

19. FOF Resources
http://akeeba.info/fof

20. You ask, I reply

21. The End
is the beginning