Overview Seagull 2.0

Table of Contents

  1. Related
  2. What's New?
  3. What's Planned
  4. What you Need
  5. New Conventions
    1. Resources stored in Registry
    2. Input/Output objects replaced by Request/Response
  6. Core Project Values
Here you will all the info you need to get up to speed with the PHP5 only version of Seagull. The main points are:

What's New?

  • clarified distinction between tasks and filters
  • managers have been renamed to controllers
  • master templates have been renamed to layouts
  • actions changed from _cmd_actionName() to _doAction()
  • exclusive use of exceptions, try/catch, no PEAR errors
    • all php errors captured and thrown as exceptions
  • much easier to extend and override all classes in the framework
  • cleaner request handling
    • distinction between tainted/clean data
    • Zend_Filter_Input used for powerful filtering and validation of data
  • class member visibility identifiers (private/protected/public) enforced
  • type hinting used throughout
  • we've moved to PHPunit for testing
  • routing now standard, Horde_Routes used and encapsulated in SGL2_Router
  • CSS/Javscript - Yaml and jQuery are the currently preferred frameworks but of course you can use whatever you want
  • PHP autoload includes all files automatically, no need to require files if you follow PEAR naming conventions
    • use-at-will architecture, only named classes are loaded
    • environment (autoload, include paths) initialised by just including SGL2.php, only 2 files loaded!
  • PEAR no longer bundled
  • Coding Standards enhancements
    • includes must go at top of files
    • no more conditional includes
    • reducing number of files is not a top concern as opcode cache usage is presumed
  • single installation of Seagull framework for all your projects

What's Planned

  • event hooks and plugin architecture
  • PEAR packaging and hosting of all components, ie "pear upgrade seagull/core" instead of "svn up"
  • continuous integration environment with PHPunit and friends
  • 100% code coverage (well as close as possible)

What you Need

  • the most recent versions of PEAR and Zend framework must be in your PHP include path (set in php.ini)
  • the most recent version of Horde Routes 
    $ sudo pear channel-discover pear.horde.org
$ sudo pear install horde/routes
  • a commandline terminal :-)

New Conventions

Resources stored in Registry

All framework resources are now stored in a registry (SGL_Registry), get them from the registry rather than using singletons 

$req = SGL_Registry2::get('request');
$cache = SGL_Registry2::get('cache');
$db = SGL_Registry2::get('db');
// ... etc

Input/Output objects replaced by Request/Response

The parameters to all controller action methods were SGL_Registry and SGL_Output, respectively, in 0.6-bugfix, referred to by the variables $input and $output. The same variables are used in >= 2.0 but now refer to the SGL2_Request and SGL2_Response objects, and are only used for storing request and response data and not any internal objects.

Core Project Values

  • less is more
  • avoiding code bloat: all additional features/enhancements are installed on a plugin basis, core is kept clean and minimal
  • no wheel reinvention tolerated: usage of existing high quality libs that conform with PEAR/PHP coding standards
  • doing things the 'PHP way' preferred rather than over-engineering code
  • performance is key: Seagull continues position itself as a problem solver for high traffic environments
  • no dumbing down for PHP newbs, not worth the tradeoff in code bloat