This is an overview of the architecture used by influx. ApplicationSkeleton and API present the guts of the framework, while QuickStart gives you a nice tutorial on how to deploy your first influx application.

The Components

The goal here is to simplify your application's organization, and let you focus on functionality. Controllers contain all the application logic. On a true MVC framework, it's used to pull data from a Model and pass it to a View. On Influx's tiny approach, it's up to the user to define the Model (although I strongly suggest to encapsulate all functionality on separate classes).

Uh? A controller ? Like the remote one ?

A controller encapsulates the functionality of a certain module of your application. On Influx, it's a plain PHP class with methods that define its actions.

/* A class in /app/some.php */
class SomeController extends Controller {

	/* Called when someone accesses http://domain.com/index.php?/some */
	function index() {
	
	}
	
	/* Called when someone accesses http://domain.com/index.php?/some/other */
	function other($give, $me, $params) {
		echo "give $give me $me params $params";
		print_r($this->argv);
	}
}

Invoking controllers and passing parameters

Influx automatically exports all your controller actions so they can be accessed by the browser.

When a user accesses http://domain.com/index.php?/some/action, Influx will instantiate a new SomeController and call its action() action.

Parameters are passed automatically to the function, and the $this->argv variable (inside a controller) retains an array of what was passed to the action, for instance, when a user accesses http://domain.com/index.php?/some/other/parameter/is/nice, Influx will instantiate SomeController and call other('parameter', 'is', 'nice').

To create a private function in a controller, just prepend it with an underscore. Any access to _actionName will be denied.

Form data on controllers

Form (POST) data is always passed to the $this->data['form'] controller variable ($_POST is unset after that). So, a field like <input type="text" name="somefield"/>, POSTed data will be accessed through $this->data['form']['somefield'] on the controller. Please check the TestController on the sample application source code for more info.

The View

The View is what is presented to the user. It receives data from the controller (via variables) to the user and pass data from the user (via POST) back to the controller.

View files must reside on /app/views/controller/action.php, so after Influx instantiates SomeController and call action(), it will render /app/views/some/action.php using the default layout on /app/views/default.php. You can change the layout by setting $this->layout = 'layoutname' inside the controller (this will render /app/views/layoutname.php.

Variables are passed, from the controller to the view, using the controller's set() method, for example, if you call $this->set('myparam', 'This is my parameter'); on the Controller, $myparam will be acessible on the view, containing This is my parameter. POSTed variables can be acessed via the special $form variable.