The Fluency framework is a minimalistic web framework for PHP 5.3. Its only purpose is dispatching HTTP requests and providing the developer a way to handle them following the MVC architectural pattern. Hierarchical MVC (HMVC) is supported out of the box, meaning that separate sections of the served content can be provided by multiple controllers.
Fluency takes some inspiration from functional programming. Actions (controllers), views and action filters are all internally represented as functions. This provides many advantages, for example, views can be composed like mathematical functions: compare the function composition f(g(x)) with the composite renderer "layout + post".
Because actions (controllers) are also functions and can only return a single value, the use of hierarchical MVC, that is, using separate actions to provide separate sections of the content, is highly encouraged, also helping to achieve a proper separation of concerns.
Generally, Fluency favors convention over configuration, but the conventions are not hard-coded and can be easily changed. The resolution of action, view and action filter names is a responsibility of resolvers, which are, again, functions, which reside in the application bootstrap script and can be easily replaced.
As already mentioned, Fluency aims to be lightweight and avoids reinventing the wheel by including only the most basic functionality, that is, request dispatching, URL routing, rendering and action filtering. If that matches your attitude towards web frameworks, you should definitely give Fluency a try!
My eyes blink open and I stretch; the house is pleasantly silent. All I can hear was the quiet swoosh of the waves outside. My bedroom overlooks the ocean and each morning I wake up to the sound of seagulls screeching over who gets the old sand-covered sandwich, the chip packet that still has some crumbs or some-other piece of abandoned food. Sometimes I think they squawk just for the sake of waking me up really early. I don’t mind though. I like the stillness of my house before my family wakes up. During the day my mum and dad’s arguing gets so loud that even hiding under my doona and turning my iPod up full blast can’t block it out. My sister Kristy doesn’t even stay at the house. She is always at parties or at her friend’s house doing up her bouncy blonde hair and talking about boys. I can’t stick boys, especially my little brother Angus. He has scruffy brown hair and his face is usually sporting some disgusting accessory like dry snot or smeared vegemite. Usually I escape the house like Kristy does; only I don’t go to friend’s houses or the shopping centre, I run down to the beach.
Story line – Girl lives near beach and likes to go down their to get away from her family. One day at the beach she finds a little pixie. (Still deciding what happens next) – What do you think should happen?
While it may not be a common problem, I ran into this while working on a simple website I was building, and have recieved permission to share it with the community. I had a paginated table, and wanted a SUMed column to support sorting. This is how I did it.
Note that the coming release of CakePHP 1.3, has an awesome feature known as Virtual Fields http://book.cakephp.org/view/1608/Virtual-fields, which are far superior to this little trick.
