Professional PHP Design Patterns

21.1. Designing the Core

The steps to becoming a great programmer revolve around the core of the application:

1. You program procedurally using a collection of includes.

2. Next you build your own framework to use as a base for your next project.

3. You then abandon your framework and leveraging existing proven frameworks in your project.

Normally, I move forward using what I've learned by getting to step 3 and would recommend one of the frameworks mentioned in Chapter 2. However, because I'm trying to demonstrate the usage of Design Patterns from an initial planning perspective, I am opting to create a very simple framework. While existing frameworks would jumpstart this application, the code is already written by someone else. I can only make guesses as to the thought processes of the original programmers.

A type of architecture I favor is Model-View-Controller, or MVC. To begin the core of the application, I'm going to build three objects, a controller, a module (or model), and a view object.

Figure 21-1. Figure 21-1

The Controller object (Figure 21-1) will be responsible for determining what type of action the application is trying to accomplish from the web request. It has two public methods, __construct() and render(). __construct() will be responsible for making sense of the web request. It will also process any posted information. render() will be responsible for executing the proper ...