6CS028 Workshop - Web Frameworks

Main Page >> Advanced Web Technologies >> Workbook >> Week 02

Consider using a PHP framework for your assessment. Here are some popular ones:

CodeIgniter

• CodeIgniter homepage
• Getting started tutorial

Nothing too complicated in the tutorial above, however I would recommend that you skip the "Routing" section for now, as it make the format of the URL more confusing. Stick to the standard format for now:

[your-site-url]index.php/pages/view

So far example:

http://mi-linux.wlv.ac.uk/~in9352/codeigniter/index.php/pages/view

Go straight to the "News section" exercise, which will teach you about database access... much more important!

Yii

• Yii homepage

CakePHP

• CakePHP homepage
• Getting started tutorial

mod_rewrite

Note that because of the way mod_rewrite is set up on the server you need to add a RewriteBase line in the existing .htaccess file, as follow:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteBase /~0123456/cake
   RewriteRule    ^$ app/webroot/    [L]
   RewriteRule    (.*) app/webroot/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

IMPORTANT: Replace "0123456" with your student number and "cake" by the folder in which you have uploaded the framework.

Alternatively you could NOT use mod_rewrite, the tutorial above tells you how (see "A Note on mod_rewrite" section)

Cache

If you are getting the following error message:

Warning: _cake_core_ cache was unable to write 'cake_dev_en-gb' to File cache in /studhome/staff/acad/in9352/public_html/cake/lib/Cake/Cache/Cache.php on line 309

You need to make the "app/tmp" folder (and all its sub-folders) writable by all in order to solve this.

If you are still getting cache errors/warnings after this, it might be because the version of PHP running on the server is too old, and caching doesn't work (we have 5.2.4 and the documentation says it should be 5.2.8 or more). You could always disable the cache in the Config/core.php file. Simply remove the following blocs located at the bottom of the file.

/**
 * Configure the cache used for general framework caching.  Path information,
 * object listings, and translation cache files are stored with this configuration.
 */
Cache::config('_cake_core_', array(
	'engine' => $engine,
	'prefix' => $prefix . 'cake_core_',
	'path' => CACHE . 'persistent' . DS,
	'serialize' => ($engine === 'File'),
	'duration' => $duration
));

/**
 * Configure the cache for model and datasource caches.  This cache configuration
 * is used to store schema descriptions, and table listings in connections.
 */
Cache::config('_cake_model_', array(
	'engine' => $engine,
	'prefix' => $prefix . 'cake_model_',
	'path' => CACHE . 'models' . DS,
	'serialize' => ($engine === 'File'),
	'duration' => $duration
));

Not ideal though :/

Symfony

• Symfony homepage

Akelos

• Akelos homepage

Zend Framework

• Zend Framework homepage

IMPORTANT: So far I have not managed to successfully install Zend on mi-linux :(