As you know from reading Malt Blue, I’m rather a Zend Framework fan. Whether it’s the controller plugins, easily adding RSS feeds to applications, configuration with Zend Config or more – I really believe it’s one of the best PHP framework choices. But well, it’s a bit heavyweight. Enter Kohana!
As you know from reading Malt Blue, I’m rather a Zend Framework fan. Whether it’s the controller plugins, easily adding RSS feeds to applications, configuration with Zend Config or more - I really believe it’s one of the best framework choices that PHP has to offer.
However recently I’ve been doing a lot of research in to some of the best PHP frameworks and codebases, including Symfony 1 & Symfony 2, Drupal, CakePHP and Kohana for a technical documentation project that I’ve been working on.
As a part of that project, I’ve had to really come up to speed about how they’re composed and the process for doing core configuration, including:
Well, to say the least, I was really surprised at just how simple, lightweight and easy Kohana is to use. Wow, what a true breath of fresh air it is after using Zend Framework for so long now.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not leaving Zend Framework behind, I’m still a big fan. But I have to be honest and acknowledge that Zend Framework can be a lot of work to get started with and to setup testing with as well.
Personally, I believe it’s worth the effort for the beautiful product that you get with it - but well, do you need to go through the amount of effort every time? No!
If you’re looking for a feature rich, flexible, fast and sensibly configurable PHP framework, right out of the box to get up to speed with, that your developers can learn quickly, yet learn some very good practices, then look no further than Kohana.
What’s more, it’s got some really gifted PHP developers backing it.
Now it’s one thing for me to make these claims, but as developers, we need to see assertions backed up and we love to see code. So in the following application, we’re going to create a simple application that has database and cache support and in a controller, uses that support to displays a list of users from a database, using a cache to speed up the process, where possible.
So before we go any further, grab a copy of the latest, stable, version of Kohana, version 3.2.0 at the time of writing. Extract that to your local development environment and get it ready to go with your webserver of choice.
In your extracted codebase, open up application/bootstrap.php. In it, search for the following line:
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You’ll see that all the options in the array are commented out. Change it to match the configuration below.
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I’m using MySQL for this application. So if you’re using another database, please change the schema as appropriate.
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This schema gives us two tables; one will hold the session information and the second will be hold a set of users that we’ll query and display shortly. Load that in using your MySQL client of choice and then let’s look at the controller setup.
In application/config/database.php, add the following code:
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This provides a default database configuration for use. Change it to use the settings in your local development environment.
In application/config/cache.php, add the following code:
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This says that we’re using APC for our application cache.
Under application/classes/controller/ create a new file called users.php. In that file, put the following code:
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What that code does is to say that we’ll be using a template called users.php. After that, we retrieve the database configuration based on the automatically determined environment configuration and we set the cache to use the APC cache.
Then we retrieve a list of id’s and email addresses from the table, tblUsers, if it’s not able to be loaded from the APC cache. After that, we assign the users list to the template variable users and we’re ready to look at our view variable.
Under application/views, create a file called users.php and in it put the following code:
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What this does is to iterate over the value of the users template variable that we assigned earlier, displaying the user id and email address in a simple HTML table. Nothing could be easier.
Now that all that’s done, open up your application to the url: http://your_configured_url/users. All being well, what you’re going to see a page a lot like the following:
You can see that with so little effort, we have a header and a table outputting the user records from the table we setup earlier. What could be easier? Not much really.
Now, to be fair, this is a pretty trivial example and I’m sure experts in both the Zend Framework and Kohana camps could write a much better application. But really, this is so simple, so fast and so easy to build. What’s more it’s easy to follow and configure for junior and intermediate skilled developers alike.
Do you use Zend Framework? Do you think that Kohana’s a simpler choice? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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