Weapon of Choice

I’ll be using UML for the models. Why? Simply because I have experience with it and because I’m comfortable with it. An excellent tool for making UML models is Dia. It’s free, and it does what I need it to do. I’ve used it for projects before, both at school and at work. Again, I’m comfortable with this program and I’ve grown to love it.

Vision

At the base of the framework I want to have an object that functions as some sort of registry. The task of this object is to keep the framework together, connecting all the parts. For now, I’ll be calling this object by it’s name, “Eddy”. At this point, I am not getting into the attributes and functions of the objects quite yet. The Eddy object should be a singleton, there can only be one of them at a time. I don’t want a bunch of Eddies running around…

Eddy is supported by plugins. These plugins are tracked by Eddy and are callable through Eddy. There are abstract classes for Plugin, Model and Controller, which have to be extended to provide further functionality… This is all I have for now. This is the model I had in my head, and hopefully it will gradually become clearer as I go.

Ready, set, go!

So let’s get started. To begin with, I’ve decided to go for the following file/folder structure:

Folder structure

I’ve worked with the MVC pattern before, and I know these are the most basic elements I’ll be needing. I will very likely be adding more folders as I go, but for now this will do. My first goal with the framework is to implement the front controller pattern. Basically, I want all URL requests to go through the index.php file. To achieve this, I’ve added a few basic rules to the .htaccess file. It will first check to see if the requested URL really exists as a file. This is because I still want the browser to be able to download files such as images or style sheets. Without these rules, even requests such as “background.jpg”and “style.css” would be internally redirected to the index.php file, causing these images and style sheets to be broken. The .htaccess file now consists of the following:

[code]
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php [L]
[/code]

The “L” flag given to the rewrite rule makes this the last rule to be applied, and thus prevents any further rewriting of the URL after this line.

Now, no matter what URL is entered, all requests will be internally routed to the index.php file. My next goal will be to make the index.php file actually do something with the requests, as for now it will simply return a blank page. And of course we all know that the usefulness of blank pages on the internet are quite limited.