Swiftly

About

Swiftly is a simple, small footprint, MVC-esque framework designed for quickly prototyping small sites or systems. By no means is it a fully featured framework, and anyone looking to build anything of any serious complexity or scope should probably stop reading here and find a more appropriate tool.

Swiftly originally started life as a learning project in the summer of 2019, but has since quickly grown into the mini framework that exists today. Swiftly is not suitable for production environments. It lacks any real security or advanced features and isn't even guaranteed to work in most cases. However, if you just need a scaffold against which to quickly throw together a prototype, Swiftly might just be the no-nonsense framework you're after!

Structure

The structure of code in Swiftly is very similar to most of the MVC frameworks currently available. Your code will mostly be separated out into controllers, models and views.

Controllers

Controllers are the main drivers of the framework. Here, the incoming request is processed, business logic performed and user input handled. For typical web applications, the job of almost every controller will be to organise communication with the database through Models and to return a rendered View file.

All Controllers live in the App/Controller directory.

Models

Models, as in most frameworks, handle communicating with the database and making sure the responses are represented in useful formats.

TODO:

All Models live in the App/Model directory.

Views

TODO:

All Views live in the App/View directory.

Routing

Lets say I want to define a /hello route. The first thing I need to do is edit the routes.json file. This file can be found in the config/ directory and contains a list containing all the possible routes in your application, along with the controllers they map to and the HTTP methods they support.

If you open the example config/routes.json file, you should see something similar to the following:

{
    "home": {
        "path":     "/",
        "methods":  ["GET"],
        "handler":  "Home::index"
    }
}

This block defines a route called "home", that will match on GET requests to the root / URL and is handled by the index method of the Home controller. Each route definition can have the following values:

Path

Required

The URL path to match against.

"path": "/hello/world"

Takes a valid string.

Note: For the time being, all URLS must start with a forward slash /.

Handler

Required

The controller used to handle this route.

"handler": "Controller::method"

Accepts either a string in the format "Controller::method" or a 2 element array in the format [ "Controller", "method"].

Methods

*Optional*

The HTTP method allowed by this route.

"methods": ["GET", "POST"]

An array of HTTP verbs.

At the moment, Swiftly only supports the following methods:

• GET
• POST
• PUT
• DELETE
• UPDATE

Tags

*Optional*

Reference

// TODO: Document important functions