Macaw - A Simple PHP Router

by NoahBuscher • 13 years ago

51 49 13 years ago

nodesocket2• 13 years ago

Probably shouldn't be "hard" coding the scheme (http). Check $_SERVER['https']. You can make sure this fastcgi param exists with a simple directive in nginx (fastcgi_params):

    fastcgi_param  HTTPS  $https if_not_empty;

Also, the 404 route, should be able to be defined as a custom function:

    Macaw::fourofour(function() {
        header($_SERVER["SERVER_PROTOCOL"] . " 404 Not Found");
        header("Status: 404 Not Found");
    });

NoahBuscher4• 13 years ago

Errors are now functions!

X45• 13 years ago

fourofour is not as semantic as notFound, or not_found xD ..

idk. this mixes up routing and api building, right? What people currently use most to build their api (mostly afterwards) is: http://docs.guzzlephp.org/en/latest/

btw. here's a nice and new php framework I've just recently found: http://www.cygniteframework.com/2013/07/quickstart.html

whichdan• 13 years ago

Looks like a nice alternative to using Silex if you just need routing.

pplante2• 13 years ago

this is very elegant. i haven't used php (beyond wordpress) in years, so i am sure a lot has changed with all the frameworks which cropped up. one of the things i miss about php was the simplicity of dropping a file into a path and making requests directly to it, no extra dependencies required. i know a lot of people prefer prettier urls, so why not use .htaccess file for mod_rewrite rather than using something like macaw?

nice job on creating a really damn simple interface.

girvo2• 13 years ago

.htacess and nginx rewriting breaks down when you need to do more complex stuff, at least if you wasn't to keep things maintainable and clean. Pushing routing like this through to the app side gives a lot more flexibility :)

pplante2• 13 years ago

i can see why having route parsing in the code would be useful. especially when dealing with user created urls such as "/user/pplante/profile"

girvo2• 13 years ago

Nice. Php's community have -- with the advent of sane dependency management through Composer, no more PEAR yay! -- move to this small composable library style. I think it's a great thing, using Macaw (or Slim, in my case) plus your business logic modelled as raw, SOLID, tested classes gives you an amazing API to work with,both on the PHP side, and on the network side. I haven't needed to use Symfony for anything new lately,though if I was building a huge app from scratch with a larger team, Symfony is where it's at.

userbinator• 13 years ago

Oh, that sort of router...

For a second I thought someone had coded an IP router in PHP. Which would be a really interesting thing to see, if not particularly practical.

Pengu• 13 years ago

pfsense is as close as it gets

X45• 13 years ago

an even better solution is http://cumulusnetworks.com/ but it's not in php. wouldn't make sense in php anyway.

krapp5• 13 years ago

really nice.

if I had any suggestions at all though it would be to have the 404 route actually return the 404 header (or have a way to specify headers with routes), and also have it handle https.

NoahBuscher4• 13 years ago

Great! I'll get to work on these. :D

X45• 13 years ago

how about caching as a separate composer requirement, or do you think caching should be in a higher level in the stack?

phaed4• 13 years ago

http://macaw.co/ Oblivious or on purpose?

krapp5• 13 years ago

two people can't name their thing after the same bird?

phaed4• 13 years ago

Well when one thing has had a viral kickstarter campaign, been on every Tech blog, and its name known by just about every developer who cares about web design. Then to hear something else named the exact same name around the same time feels kinda weird.

mikeg8• 13 years ago

I agree with OP. While maybe "oblivious" is a bit condescending, I would be a little peeved if I was a founder of Macaw... the design tool that has been hugely popular here lately.

brickcap• 13 years ago

The OP has another project called parrot

https://github.com/GetParrot/Parrot

so I think he just likes parrots and the name is coincidence.

phaed4• 13 years ago

Ah, there you go. That is quite a coincidence.

NoahBuscher4• 13 years ago

Yep! Macaw will be the future router of Parrot. I'm doing a rewrite.

chime• 13 years ago

If you want something with more features but still just as simple, check out: http://flightphp.com/

I'm using it to make a JSON backend API and it works great.

nodesocket2• 13 years ago

+1 for flight. Simple, yet powerful.

citricsquid• 13 years ago

How does flight compare with klein (https://github.com/chriso/klein.php)?

agumonkey2• 13 years ago

klein, bottle, flask .. Am I seeing things ?

thejosh• 13 years ago

I'm a huge fan of silex, I use it as a JSON backend API that fetches from a SOAP API.

Silex and other microframeworks are great for these.

X45• 13 years ago

I once used http://fatfreeframework.com/home in a mozilla hackathon; was quite easy to get going.

fidz2• 13 years ago

Is there any pattern matching router in PHP? Just like Journey on Rails. It is faster to use Patrern Matching than sequential brute force route.

jmathai• 13 years ago

Not just a router but Epiphany[1] lets you specify a regex for routes[2]. My favorite part though is the API module which I blogged about a while back[3].

[1] https://github.com/jmathai/epiphany

[2] https://github.com/jmathai/epiphany/blob/master/examples/reg...

[3] https://trovebox.com/blog/building-trovebox-entirely-using-o...

fidz2• 13 years ago

It still use sequential matching[0]. What i meant is something like AST implementation in routing algorithm, which is obviously faster than sequential algorithm [1] [2]

[0] https://github.com/jmathai/epiphany/blob/master/src/EpiRoute...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunting-yard_algorithm

[2] http://blog.bigbinary.com/2013/01/29/journey-into-rails-rout...

10098• 13 years ago

It's... 87 lines of PHP?

Phil_Latio• 13 years ago

Don't worry, I don't get it either...

augustohp• 13 years ago

I like the "slim" approach on LOC, kudos to that. I would point some - IMO - design problems:

# Static attributes and methods. Are they really needed? They are difficult to test and predict, specially the public attributes.

# The "echo"s on routes. Since every route is a method (encapsulated by one), this behavior could be easily avoided (easier to test and control). You are already using callables, you can easily test (and run) matching routes to execute any callable until a stream is given (on Respect/Rest we learned what a powerful feature it is).

# Lack of tests. Although low LOC, there is much happening, specially on the "dispatch" method (it would be awesome to know through tests what the If's/Else's actually do and prevent).

# Why (as mentioned before) the error header do not provide a proper HTTP header!? It would also be nice to provide two different error routes: one for client errors (404: not found, forbidden) and another to server errors (HTTP/1.1 500 Server Error).

A suggestion (we've been talking a lot on Respect/Rest) is to implement the URI Template (RFC 6570) for matching routes and hydration of parameters (something macaw lacks but i like using the PHP way of $_GET, $_POST and filter_input()). With a component dealing nicely with URI Templates many projects would benefit from it.

tmzt• 13 years ago

I don't see a composer.json in the root of the Github. Is that planned?

timmow• 13 years ago

One problem is the library as it stands doesn't match up to composers namespacing requirements - which some php developers have decided they don't like and therefore are not going to support

NoahBuscher4• 13 years ago

I'll add one after I fix some things up.

vayarajesh• 13 years ago

Handy. Nice

vaidik• 13 years ago

Great project. I personally prefer Python over PHP and use it a lot for most of the web applications. But when I must use PHP in some cases, I like frameworks like this.

For precisely this reason, I wrote a PHP router like this called Marg - http://github.com/vaidik/marg. Used it for 3 projects and I love the way I can keep things simple and sane. And that's why I appreciate this project as well.

Great to see sane projects like these in the PHP community.

martin_• 13 years ago

Sane PHP developers typically don't use global to avoid using objects properly! I only mention it because it seems you haven't given PHP a fair chance

krapp5• 13 years ago

to be fair, I've seen that idiom used quite a bit when calling database objects. It's still terrible.

Not as bad as using extract() though. Yes i'm looking at you Wordpress.

pauletienney• 13 years ago

Double name is double. cf : http://macaw.co/

y1426i• 13 years ago

Magic methods are expensive in PHP. You might as well define those explicitly.

Macaw - A Simple PHP Router

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