Curly Inversion of Control

A simple IoC-Container for PHP

Curly-IoC is a simple Inversion of Control container for PHP. It implements the Dependency Injection pattern as a constructor and as a setter injection. It's created to be quite small, have a small footprint and very easy to understand.

The input for the main container instance is an object definition. Currently just a xml file or string is possible, but more is in the queue. In this xml file you can configure your instances and the container is doing the dirty instanciation stuff and wires the objects together.

Here is an example for a xml configuration file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<configuration>
	<context name="app">
		<object id="db" class="PDO" allocation-policy="single">
			<ctr>
				<param>mysql:host=localhost;dbname=test</param>
				<param>username</param>
				<param>password</param>
			</ctr>
		</object>
	</context>
</configuration>

This file will create a context with name app. Contexts are used to put some objects with the same concern together. Inside the app context a PDO object is created with the id db. The constructor of that class requires the datasource name and the authentication data, so this stuff is noted inside the ctr tag in the xml file. ctr stands for constructor arguments. It takes an arbitrary number of param tags. In this case the connection is opened to a mysql database test at our local host and the user username with password password is used for authentication.

You can use this object with the following code snippet:

$container=new CI_Container();
$ctx=$container
	->parseFile('config.xml') // Specify here the appropriate filename
	->getContext('app');
$database=$ctx->getObject('db'); // Here we retrieve the created PDO instance

// Do some database stuff:
foreach($database->query('select * from myTable') as $row) {
	// ...
}

You can find an easy example with Zend Framework integration in the sourcecode.

Support

If you have any problems, critics, suggestions, ideas, bugs or whatever on Curly-IoC please contact me via...

...mail at martin@curlybracket.de

...twitter at http://twitter.com/MKuckert