Presentation done on February the 18th on the MVC pattern at the first event of PHPBelgium in Liège. The idea was to transform a simple spaghetti application into a well structured, MVC-aware and framework-free application with nice URL just using regular PHP and Apache's configuration.

1. PHPBelgium event 18-02-2009
MVC = Make Venerated Code?
Patrick Allaert
PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
http://www.phpbelgium.be/

2. About Me
Started developping using PHP 3
Ten years of FOSS evangelism
Contribute to different FOSS:
Tabellio (Open Source Collaboration for assemblies)
Xoo°f (eXtensible Open Object Oriented Framework)
KDESvn (Subversion frontend for KDE)
Lead developer:
APM (Alternative PHP Monitor)
Working @ AUSY
Blog: http://patrickallaert.blogspot.com/
PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
http://www.phpbelgium.be/

3. Model-View-Controller (1)
“… is an architectural pattern used in software
engineering. Successful use of the pattern
isolates business logic from user interface
considerations, resulting in an application
where it is easier to modify either the visual
appearance of the application or the underlying
business rules without affecting the other.”
Wikipedia
PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
http://www.phpbelgium.be/

4. Model-View-Controller (2)
Model
DB
Requests Controller
(X)HTML
View XML
PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
http://www.phpbelgium.be/

5. Design of some PHP applications
PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
http://www.phpbelgium.be/

6. Managing this is sometimes...
very difficult...
PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
http://www.phpbelgium.be/

7. Demo application
/index.php /team.php?id=<TeamID>
PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
http://www.phpbelgium.be/

8. Spaghetti code
PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
http://www.phpbelgium.be/

9. Taking the Business Logic apart (1)
PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
http://www.phpbelgium.be/

10. Taking the Business Logic apart (2)
PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
http://www.phpbelgium.be/

11. Taking the Business Logic apart (3)
PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
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12. Evaluating the situation
Model is reusable Views tightly linked to
Changes to the the model
business logic does Views impacted if the
not require inspecting API of the model
all files change
Calls to the model may
be difficult to find:
spread everywhere in
views
PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
http://www.phpbelgium.be/

13. On the path to MVC (1)
PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
http://www.phpbelgium.be/

14. On the path to MVC (2)
Directory views to be added in the include_path
View parameters are passed using global
variables
Hint: $variableName may also be written:
$GLOBALS['variableName']
The latest form may be used to differentiate
variables defined by the controller file from the
local view variables
“htdocs” could be renamed “controllers”
PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
http://www.phpbelgium.be/

15. Howto: Clean URL
Clean URL: Transforming
http://example.com/index.php?type=article&id=25&date=20020322into:
http://example.com/article/200203226
Enables better search engine indexing
URIs are not supposed to change (Cool URIs don't change)
Doesn't expose the server-side language
Most MVC Frameworks provide clean URL mechanism, how to
setup one with our structure?
PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
http://www.phpbelgium.be/

16. Clean URL: method #1
Using Apache's mod_rewrite:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/team/([0-9]*)$ /team.php?id=$1 [L]
Ability to transform URLs on the fly and mapping
part of the URL directly to a $_GET variable
PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
http://www.phpbelgium.be/

17. Clean URL: method #2
Dropping the “.php” extension and forcing the
mime-type/handler used in the Apache
configuration
<FilesMatch "^(index|team)$">
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</FilesMatch>
or:
<FilesMatch "^(index|team)$">
SetHandler application/x-httpd-php
</FilesMatch>
PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
http://www.phpbelgium.be/

18. Performance impact (index page)
Concurrency 1 15
“spaghetti” 1483.15 2798.23
Model-View 1353.17 2388.61
MVC 1339.72 2364.66
Clean URL #1 1320.61 2303.99
Clean URL #2 1412.43 2468.83
Zend Framework 164.11 280.22
In requests/second, higher = better
PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
http://www.phpbelgium.be/

19. Performance impact (team page)
Concurrency 1 15
“spaghetti” 1372.66 2428.79
Model-View 1243.78 2142.79
MVC 1235.48 2364.66
Clean URL #1 1232.39 2090.51
Clean URL #2 1192.78 2040.44
Zend Framework 158.77 264.65
In requests/second, higher = better
PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
http://www.phpbelgium.be/

20. Questions ?
PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
http://www.phpbelgium.be/

21. Thanks :-)
These slides will be available through:
http://patrickallaert.blogspot.com/
PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
http://www.phpbelgium.be/

22. License
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PHPBelgium – Belgian PHP community
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