A light and simple PHP5 framework. The goal of lucent is simple. To be a minimalistic yet useful light weight PHP framework.
Most frameworks that I see offer a lot of features. While they are often very useful, they also create complexity, even when founded on simple ideas.
Lucent strives to stay simple, by focusing on the basics. Lucent will provide:
- A simple, clean syntax for routes, supporting things like named parameters and middleware.
- Separation between code and HTML through views.
- Helper classes to deal with common data conversions and error handling. Including those which help implement RESTful APIs.
However, it will not provide any of the following. Not because I don't like these features. But because everyone has a preference, and I'd rather let the developer decide which (if any) they would like to use.
- A database abstraction layer.
- A templating language. PHP is a templating language, we don't need another one on top by default.
- "Automagical" routing or other features which are unexpected on by default. I want the developer to have full control of the behavior of the app, with no surprises.
Lucent is somewhat inspired by many existing frameworks such as Laravel. Which is a wonderful framework, that I'd recommend people try. But even that has had a few automatic features which caused me some grief.
Usage is simple. To create routes, open app/config/routes.php and write
easy to understand code like the following:
Route::Get('/', function($req) {
return View::make('index');
});
Route::Get('/hello/:name', function($req) {
return View::make('hello', ['name' => $req['name']]);
});
The second paramter can be any callable type, for small sites, lambdas work great! It can also be an array of callable types to support middleware. If any function returns data, then it stops the chain, making pre and post filters trivial to implement.
As mentioned before, Lucent uses PHP as the templating system. So no new syntax
to learn. Just place you views in app/resources/views and you're good to go.
The usage of views is very inspired by the effective syntax of
Laravel. You can place views in a directory heirarchy,
and access them with dot syntax. For example:
return View::make('foo.bar');
will use the file app/resources/views/foo/bar.php as the template. It is
still very much a work in progress, but already I'm finding it simple and easy
to work with.