PHP Reusable Web Framework (rwfPHP)

What is rwfPHP? The rwfPHP framework is a set of Object Oriented classes that allows development of Object Oriented Event driven web applications. The main goals of rwfPHP is to speed development through the use of a simple event driven model, reuse of code through web controls, and separation of presentation and logic layers through the use of templates. In terms of MVC, rwfPHP has a FrontController, Model level is provide by using Web Controls and the View is completed by use of Smarty Templates or PHP. Model - Code Reuse with Web Controls With major frameworks today the classes you create will inherit from a particular framework class. The most important inherited class in the rwfPHP framework, which all classes are inherited from at some point, is the Control. The WebControl class inherits from the Control class. Controls made from the Control class are the building blocks of the rwfPHP framework. The interaction and implementation of controls is the rwfPHP model in which web applications are built. The control is the basic structure for creating abstraction. Coupling controls together will build more complex abstract controls. The reuse of the controls is directly related to the level and simplicity of your abstraction. Events are the communication that welds the controls together. Events are caught within each control. The event does not need to know of any specific instance of another control except that it is the kind of class that it expects. View - Use of Templates We have abstraction of the communication level and the code through the event model and the building blocks of controls. All that is left is the abstraction of the presentation level. Templates are built into the rwfPHP framework. With templates we can separate the code and the presentation levels. Each control added to any other objects controls collection will be automatically set to show up in the template. All the template needs to do is put in a line to display the control. Each handles its own template and display functionality. This gives each control the power to make sure it will look a certain way no matter where it is reused. The template engine that rwfPHP framework uses is Smarty (smarty.php.net). Controller - Simple Event Driven Model The simple event driven model is to help speed the learning curve of window’s application developers. People with a background in the basic concepts of the window’s event driven model will see the similarities between the two. To explain in further detail we need to touch on code reuse with web controls. http://rwfphp.multispan.com/