Mvc Tag | Jacob Emerick's Blog

Best Practices in Development

Over the last few days I've been working on a relatively large change to my image linking logic. This change involved some reorganization on the server side, adding name-spacing, changing the url structure, and placing 301 redirects to all 1200+ of my photos. I made this update both in hopes of keeping some relative SEO content on the photos linked in my blog and because I wasn't happy with the original implementation (especially the data storage). This post isn't about the update, though. I wanted to talk a bit about some of the principles I used on this and other projects I work on.

Incremental Changes

This update was a rather large one to my engine. I needed to change more than just a few image links - I upgraded my entire image storage system to a relational setup. Eventually this will turn into a dedicated photography site (photos.jacobemerick.com, mayhaps). Trying to change everything and push it live at once would have been asking for disaster.

Instead I broke down this change into five steps. Each step could be tested ...

• Tags:
• agile development,
• best practice,
• mvc,
• my site,
• oop,
• seo

Why You Should Build Your Own Darn Framework (Usually)

I've always been a big fan of writing my own website frameworks. It's how I learned to code, writing and re-writing a specialized PHP framework in an iterative, agile-like development process. There have been times when I've worked within standard systems (Zend, Code Ignitor, Wordpress, etc) but I try to avoid them on personal projects. PHP has a lot of flexibility in terms of allowing a developer set their own standards and I have a very unique style and approach to custom projects that I bring to my code. Also, I have some issues with using a pre-built framework.

Too Much Functionality

Some frameworks are very abstracted out with functionality for multiple data source drivers and DOM helpers (cough cough Zend). While it is impressive how much thought went into these large, comprehensive frameworks, there is often far too much logic there for a standard web project. As an example, one of the previous systems I worked with (heavy-traffic, front-facing site) was based off of the Zend Framework. Each page load included over 300 scripts ...

• Tags:
• best practice,
• mvc,
• php,
• security

Abstract Form Handling

I've already gone over some basic form handling and form best practices with my last few posts, but building with an object-orientated MVC starts to throw forms into a different light. It's very easy to abstract out forms with their repetitive logic patterns, something that I've recently done on one of my side projects. While I don't want to explain the code line-by-line, this post will go over some of the basic thought processes and steps I took to make my abstracted form handler.

Form Wrapper

The first logic I worked out was the definition of a form. To create each new form, I create a new class that is abstracting off a base pattern. Each form class defines form elements within a standard 'get' method. This way I can call on individual form elements easily or call the entire class to pull the whole form. Example...

• Tags:
• abstraction,
• form,
• mvc,
• oop,
• php

How Many Tiers for a Clean View Layer?

An interesting possibility cropped up for my MVC a few weeks ago. I've been working with microformats on and off the last few months (you can read about one of my first adventures with them when I created a microformatted resume). I started to wonder where else my site could use this new feature. An easy place to add microformat tags are links - you can add a 'rel' attribute that describes the relationship of the link to your site. Also, if I added a layer of abstraction to my links site wide, then I could easy add behavior rules (target="_blank" and whatnot) that would affect an individual link across all of my pages and sites.

This idea would involve creating a table of all my links, internal and external, that could be mapped to meta information about the links. There would be a helper class on my site that would pull a link based on an alias, give it attributes based off of the meta data (including microformatting), and spit out a final link. No where on ...

• Tags:
• abstraction,
• mvc,
• my site,
• oop,
• template

Thoughts on Data Abstraction

Something that I've been working on a lot with both my work and personal web programming is data abstraction. The opportunity to work with several different handmade php frameworks has given me different ideas on what an effective data abstraction system should have. Without formal education, though, this post will be only based on my hands-on experience with the functionality I find myself using without true design patterns.

Data abstraction is a fancy word for treating the data as a separate entity from your web application logic. Web sites usually store their data in databases, using customized queries to pull information for their code to output and manipulate information. It doesn't matter what type of database or language you're working with; data abstraction can be employed whenever there is interaction with data (this post will be approaching this from a rough PHP - MySQL angle). Complex sites often have numerous queries scattered throughout the web site, and one needs to have intimate knowledge of the database structure during the ...

• Tags:
• mvc,
• oop,
• php

Website Overhaul

It may be no surprise to any of my long-term visitors, but I've decided to perform a deep overhaul of my website. Based partly on my recent introduction to model-view-control frameworks and partly on research into web caching and optimization, I've spent a good chunk of time analyzing my current and future website functions in the hopes of streamlining the backend code and optimizing the frontend. There are several goals that I have in mind for this overhaul, most of which will stretch my current programming skills.

Model-View-Controller Setup

The idea behind this sort of programming is breaking everything up into separate, reusable objects. All requests to the website are directed to a primary router, which interprets the request and pulls a controller to handle the page. A controller is a set of instructions based on the page type (example: home page, blog post pages, etc) that sets variables for the final page. The controller may talk to a model, which is the 'logic' for the site (usually a database object), and pull additional ...

• Tags:
• mvc,
• my site,
• oop

Dynamic Template Methods

Ever since I started working on websites during the summer of 2006 I made sure to keep dynamic and static information separate on my projects. Certain things in the website's content should remain the same, or similar, on separate pages: header, footer, navigation, etc. (I'll refer to these similar pieces as 'static' and the content that is unique to each page as 'dynamic'). However, when you work on a website with multiple pages, it becomes difficult to update the static information the same on all pages. This is where a templating system comes in handy.

A templating system allows the developer to separate the content to ease updating. When I first started with websites, I used Dreamweaver templates for this, which is a classic example of a templating system. You create a document in Dreamweaver with the header, footer, and any other information you want to remain the same across all the pages on your site and save it as a template. You can create new pages based on the template and Dreamweaver will 'lock' the template structure and only ...

• Tags:
• ajax,
• mvc,
• php,
• template,
• xml

Modular Website Setup

After making several iterations of my personal site, I've finally found a php backend solution that has made me happy. While I have no doubt that I'll find a new system or methodology within the year that will warrent a complete redesign, my current setup is surprisingly simple and fun to play with.

As php is my primary coding language, I make it a personal goal to never use third party plug-ins. I often utilize jQuery or posted Javascript plug-ins in my work, mostly because working with Javascript and forcing it to work in every available browser can be excrutiating. I have never used Ignitor or Wordpress for a project and do not see the need for it in my near future. So, when I create new sites and applications, I might find myself copying some of my old code for a particular function, but often try to make it cleaner or more efficient during the development process.

When I tackled my personal site this time around, I tried to sketch out the data flow before coding. Not only did I want a central file to handle all web page requests ...

• Tags:
• introduction,
• mvc,
• php