TooBasic: Author's Note

Well hi there, my name is Alejandro and I'm cyberly known as DAEMon Raco. In this page I'll talk about TooBasic and my motivations to create it and I'll try to give some explanations to things you may be wondering... maybe not.

TooBasic?!

Yes, the name is TooBasic, why? well, when I started I wanted to create a simple framework I could paste somewhere in a xampp or Apache folder and start typing some logic right away without the need to worry about how I read the current class to use from the url.

In a manner of speaking I still think and feel that's the goal of this framework, but if you read a little more about it you'll see it's not that basic. Perhaps, in some point I had to ask my self "Am I going too far for a basic framework?", but I've never asked me that because all the stuff I'm adding are things I want to have in my reach and in the reach of anyone who uses it regardless of the goal of a site running over TooBasic. I'll never know if I'll use this framework to display a simple welcome page at some URL, a blog, a forum or even a social network, so I need to keep an open mind and think that someday me or someone may want to use Memcached instead of Redis, or SQLite instead of MySQL, or simply create a plugin to change the skin of a welcome page.

It is too basic in a way, you create a small class in a specific place and that is a service with an interface and a basic JSON response. You set an instance variable to true and its response will be cached for an hour, just like that. But I'll agree if someone says it's not that basic.

One action one controller?!

Yes, the answer is as plain and simple as that. That's because this topic would be like the decision of placing a curly brace in the same line or the next when you write an if sentence (python doesn't apply). Anyway, I'll try to give some explanation on why I do this.

In my experience I've seen developers writing some not-so-simple logic inside a controller's action, but they are smart enough to place the complex logic inside a protected/private method inside that controller. Then they need a new action and they create a new method for that action inside the same controller. Let's assume here both actions are related to the same meaning managed by that controller, otherwise we have nothing else to discuss. Due to the smart move previously made, this new action can use that complex logic and with a few touches the developer has a new action up and running.

Time passes and a wild new controller appears and it requires that same old complex logic. But come on, we can not duplicate code, that would be ugly, so the programmer takes a ton of metallic grey duct tape and tucks them together so tightly they start sharing that complex logic... NOOOOO!!!... cof... cof, let me... let me calm down a little, I'll just take this jerrycan of gasoline AND BURN THE CODE TO ASHES!!!

"Wait!, calm down, what is the problem?"

Well, it's WRONG!, wrong from the beginning, that complex logic is shouting for its own place to live and be visited by those controllers. That complex logic MUST be part of a model. Believe me, there will be a third controller asking for that logic and for that time there's gonna be so much duck tape and dust they'll need a paleontologist to dig that piece of code out of there.

This kind of situations are those I want to mitigate by having separated classes/controllers for each action. At least in this way, that programmer will think twice about putting that logic somewhere else.

"But... what about shell tools?"

Enough!, let's change the topic already.

Engrish

As you may noticed, English is not my mother language, that's the reason way you will find some many mistakes. Believe me, I'm trying to get better at it, but s**t happens :D

Why query adapter is so complicated?

I know I know, I wasn't expecting it to become so complicated and weird and I'll try address this in the future, it is a pain even for me.

PHPUnit

Yes, we have some PHPUnit test-cases stored in our repository, but there may not be as many cases as you expect Why? Well the answer is rather simple, I don't have a testing team checking on every thing that exist inside TooBasic so I have to write every case. But I can guarantee that I'll try to write as many cases as I can, it may take a while and they may not be present in your current version, but at least I'll try.