Show HN: Ham, a fast PHP router/microframework I hacked up last night

https://github.com/radiosilence/Ham

by antihero • 14 years ago

87 63 14 years ago

github.com

antihero16• 14 years ago

Critique totally welcome!

ittan• 14 years ago

Seems much easier to use than Fat free http://fatfree.sourceforge.net/

You should evolve this into a solid/flexible micro framework.

sidchilling• 14 years ago

Ham looks good. However, Fatfree has lot more than Ham - templating, framework variables.

It will be exciting to see how Ham comes up. Will try to use it in some hobby project.

moozeek• 14 years ago

I wonder what would be hard about FatFree? To me it does not get much simpler than that. And it has a router, templating engine, auto loader (even with name space support, if you wish) and several other plugins.

It helps when you need it and lets you do things your way at the same time.

The only caveat is there's basically only one guy developing it.

damncabbage• 14 years ago

I hate to be That Guy, but how does this compare to klein.php [1]?

[1] https://github.com/chriso/klein.php

antihero16• 14 years ago

Two things I do differently:

The most important one is that everything is done within an $app context. This means that theoretically you could build two apps, and I later will be creating functionality to "mount" apps on paths, like in Flask Blueprints.

Second one is that I am going to be extending it (but keeping it lean) with other microframework-y goodness, patterns, ways to use PHP's native stuff in elegant ways, etc.

Essentially, klein is a router, but Ham will be a microframework, providing patterns for application development with it, extensions to work with other libraries, etc, ala Flask.

I'm definitely looking at Klein and seeing what I can learn from it, what can be done better, etc.

narad• 14 years ago

Can you tell us about the License for use? I do not see the license info.

antihero16• 14 years ago

Ah, I didn't really think of that initially. I'll pop one in there!

Edit: Done - BSD 2-clause.

cilice• 14 years ago

Your microframework also reminds me of Silex a lot. http://silex.sensiolabs.org/

It also uses the same $app content, and but has - at the moment - a bit more evaluating of values.

dools3• 14 years ago

I remember seeing an article or talk or something by one of the main Symfony guys on the fact that PHP was wanting, as a community, to move away from monolithic frameworks in favour of smaller, front controller style implementations. I was actually tring to find it the other day - does anyone have a link?

It's interesting to see the growing trend in this direction for PHP.

I wrote one a little while back[1] that does even less than this :) The only goal being to provide a simple way to execute classes from the web or command line with a default autoloading implementation and a way to inject new ones[2]

Personally a lot of my current direction in PHP comes from watching what's happening the node.js community - I like the way that there are a lot of small-ish packages/modules that are pretty independent.

I've written a couple of packages for RocketSled already which you can see on my github page if you're interested.

[1] https://github.com/iaindooley/RocketSled

[2] There are some obvious improvements that could be made to the current implementation which always parses the package tree ie. caching

websirnik• 14 years ago

I don't know about the article. But the truth is that Symfony2 is built from a collection of independent components. And each component could be used independently in your app without a need to use symfony framework. Here is for example a link for a routing component: https://github.com/symfony/Routing

dools3• 14 years ago

Hey that's pretty interesting. I can use that instead of writing my own routing package ;)

kaolinite• 14 years ago

The Zend Framework is the same. You can use each component completely separately. I know a few people who have used the Zend Controller classes and Zend Router in their own frameworks.

Tharkun• 14 years ago

It's an encouraging trend. One of the things I like from the Java ecosystem is that there are a couple of really nice general-purpose frameworks that can be mixed and matched with other, more specific frameworks. Like Spring + Hibernate + JSF. I never liked the idea of a big, monolithic framework pretty much forcing its way of working on me. I'm very happy to see the PHP community moving in this direction!

antihero16• 14 years ago

I like the idea of that for command line, its a wicked project. Seems a bit painful for web use though - I moved away from mapping routes to controllers automatically in favour of specifying them manually, I feel that it gives great control and leads to less magic. Not knocking your project, though! Good stuff

dools3• 14 years ago

Actually it doesn't even do that! It does so little - that r= argument just has to be a class that is autoloadable and implements the Runnable interface.

In fact, if you want routes you'd have to build it as a package and in FACT you could just create a class like this:

    class RocketHam implements rocketsled\Runnable
 {
    public function run()
    {
        $app = new Ham();
        $app->config_from_file('settings.php');

        $app->route('/pork', function($app) {
            return "Delicious pork.";
        });

        $hello = function($app, $name='world') {
            return $app->render('hello.html', array(
                'name' => $name
            ));
        };
        $app->route('/hello/<string>', $hello);
        $app->route('/', $hello);

        $app->run();
    }
 }

then put your ham/ directory in packages with a file rs.config.php:

    spl_autoload_register(function($class)
 {
     if($class == 'Ham')
         require_once(dirname(__FILE__).'/ham.php');
 }

then use .htaccess or something similar to route all requests to:

index.php?r=RocketHam

EDITS: oops sorry not used to formatting code on here

conradfr• 14 years ago

I tried the example but ran with some issues. Maybe you could specify the requirements ?

1/ It needs PHP >= 5.3 I guess (anonymous functions ?).

2/ It needs APC (use of apc_exists ?)

3/ I stopped at "Cannot use string offset as an array in ham\ham.php on line 42" (seems cache related).

antihero16• 14 years ago

Ah there were a couple of bugs. It now doesn't require a caching module to be installed, but is slower with out it. XCache is preferred as it allows closure caching.

On my laptop:

Xcache: ~700 microseconds APC: ~1,300 microseconds Dummy (no caching): ~3,712 microseconds

Gigablah2• 14 years ago

Yeah, I tried to drop in a Redis caching class and immediately ran into that problem. I noticed someone had published a method for serializing PHP closures using magic methods and reflection, but that's way too complex a workaround.

nerdfiles• 14 years ago

Following the feature set of http://www.slimframework.com/ at all?

antihero16• 14 years ago

Heh, wow - the syntax is really similar. I've never seen that before, I'll be sure to look at their code.

buchin• 14 years ago

I'd prefer Slim Framework ( http://www.slimframework.com/ ) combined with RedBean ORM and H2O Template.

antihero16• 14 years ago

Good for you :)

mise• 14 years ago

I'll stick with Slim for now because, simply, it's established and Josh there has made it into a quite solid platform.

But keep at it, well done.

jstsch• 14 years ago

In that case, you might like Concordia (https://github.com/schuttelaar/Concordia). From the same author as RedBeanPHP.

dutchbrit• 14 years ago

Looking very good! Definitely a nice start. Made me think of this MVC project: http://www.phpro.org/tutorials/Model-View-Controller-MVC.htm...

antihero16• 14 years ago

I'm sure I built my 2nd or 3rd learning framework based on that tutorial some years back :)

johnx123-up• 14 years ago

  Routes are converted to regex and cached so this process 
  does not need to happen every request.

But, regex will again degrade performance.

antihero16• 14 years ago

For most requests, there is no regex matching done, because it also caches the resolved route for a given URI :)

masklinn• 14 years ago

For matching? Because PCRE/PHP_PCRE already caches the compiled versions of regexes, so there's little to no perf hit there.

1880• 14 years ago

Aren't the regexes cached only for the current request anyway?

Loic• 14 years ago

For Photon, a micro framework for Mongrel2, we use regex. Even with 100's or 1000's of routes, you cannot even see the cost of preg_match when benchmarking because the regex are organized in a tree following the URI structure like Django. It means that most of the time, a view is found within 2 to 3 preg_match calls.

This - regex is slow to match anchored strings on a 120 character long URI - is a myth.

hendrik-xdest2• 14 years ago

Great work. Hope to see this evolve into a great little toolset.

I have gone through your code a bit and think that you should consider error handling first. Some methods return strings on error but arrays on success but this is not validated before using the value as an array (this results in the error reported before). I guess when no caching system is available the Dummy will break your code as well as it only returns false.

Also, I think using "False" instead of "false" results in two internal checks when PHP tries to determine if something is false or true, instead of one. Not sure if that is still the case with the latest PHP version, though. I reckon using "false" would be better.

antihero16• 14 years ago

Thanks, and I agree. I usually use exceptions but for some things (like cache misses) it seems unwieldy. For the example of the cache calls, I check when I've done a cache call like:

$data = $cache->get("key");

if(!$data) { // do the stuff if cache misses }

Though yes, I do need to go through and make sure it's extremely robust, as I did hack it up in an evening :)

shepik2• 14 years ago

Y U NO USE your cache like that:

  $data = $cache->get('key',function() {
    // do the stuff if cache misses
    return $some_value_to_be_cached;
  });

? It's quite handy and it forces you to separate actual logic to get the value, which is good by itself.

hendrik-xdest2• 14 years ago

I was thinking about the part where you check the cache with if (!$found)

On that note, I adapted a rule of an open source project (can't quite remember which) that said to never use !$var to validate your data. One should always use isset($found['args']) or empty($found['args']) or for example is_array($found) && count($found) > 0 to check.

gaius2• 14 years ago

Router? As in, TCP/IP? In PHP?

jlaurend• 14 years ago

"Router" as in URL routing. Here's an example from his page:

  $app->route('/pork', function($app) {
    return "Delicious pork.";
  });

gaius2• 14 years ago

OK, but why would you do that, instead of just having pork.cgi (or pork/index.cgi)? That "routing" is built into Apache or indeed any HTTP server!

lignuist• 14 years ago

Looks similar to NiceDog (which is nice, but hasn't been updated for a while.).

https://github.com/bastos/nicedog

yaix• 14 years ago

Looks good. I'd use named regex matches for the routes (like in Django) to make routes more flexible, ie. !/path/(?P<id>[0-9]{1,5}_(?P<kw>[a-z0-9_]{5,20})! etc.

antihero16• 14 years ago

Aye, I'm thinking of adding that functionality so you could do <re:blah> in the route, however for now I'm keeping it as simple as possible.

jwblackwell• 14 years ago

Looks nice, keep it simple though. There are already a lot of feature full frameworks about that to be honest you can't compete with. I've never used a really lightweight framework like this but I would definitely consider it if I had a project that was the right size.

lonnyk• 14 years ago

Am I reading this correctly that currently the route results will stay cached for the caches TTL? So if you change a route to have a different callback in your main program it will not update?

Really cool framework and congratulations on hacking this up in a night!

wseymour• 14 years ago

What, we're talking about PHP micro-frameworks and nobody's mentioned Lithium?

www.lithify.me

Your search for a modular and lightweight framework has come to an end.

soulclap2• 14 years ago

Would love to see a proper release of Lithium out, along with up-to-date docs.

troels2• 14 years ago

Refreshing with these micro frameworks as a counter movement to the monoliths. In my opinion PHP is so fragmented library wise, that trying to streamline everything is a failure - Much better to have a collection of independent modules that are stitched loosely together. It's of course very much a matter of taste.

On the technical side, I have come to prefer using straight regular expressions for routes, rather than a dsl or made-up routing syntax a la rails. It's a relatively unknown feature of preg, but you can have named captures, that pretty much gives you all that you need. For example, here's a couple of routes from a recent application of mine:

    $GLOBALS['ROUTES']['~^GET/devices/(?P<device_id>\d+)~'] = "devices/show";
    $GLOBALS['ROUTES']['~^GET/devices~'] = 'devices/index';

My front controller is then just a loop over the routes, that will resolve first match.

For example, a GET request to `/devices/1234` will resolve to the file `handlers/devices/show.php`, where `device_id` is available as a parameter.

Yes, the syntax is a bit awkward, but it's computationally efficient without a cache/compilation step and it's a standard language, rather than a proprietary one.

orlandu63• 14 years ago

I wouldn't call that computationally efficient. It is possible to make routing an O(log n) operation; your routing solution, like all routers that use regexes directly, is O(n).

tabbyjabby• 14 years ago

I'm curious; what data structure and algorithm are you using to achieve O(log n) routing?

troels2• 14 years ago

Technically, yes. What I was referring to was more mundane though. The difference between writing a parser/interpreter partially in PHP or minimizing the php code to a loop and then push all the hard stuff down to preg is significant. Optimizing it further is probably futile, compared to what else goes on in a typical http req-res cycle.

It's a red herring anyway, so I sort of regret bringing it up. Much more important is the other point - that this is a standard tool, rather than a tailored one.

Jebus• 14 years ago

You basically ripped off Silex

http://silex.sensiolabs.org/

whalesalad• 14 years ago

I vote for a rename to phlask =)

antihero16• 14 years ago

Heheh, the project was born out of enjoying flask development so much, then coming back to PHP and being like...whaaaat.

soulclap2• 14 years ago

Will definitely check this out, although I just started a project using Slim.

Slightly off-topic but besides Doctrine, RedBean and PHP ActiveRecord, is there any good and well-tested 'ORM' or some DataMapper/ActiveRecord implementation for PHP?

(I actually like PHP ActiveRecord but had some odd problems with it a while ago and well, there's 60+ issues on GitHub and no proper release since 2010.)

Show HN: Ham, a fast PHP router/microframework I hacked up last night

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