WWW Framework

WWW is a PHP micro-framework that is built loosely on model-view-control architecture and factory method design pattern. It is made for web services, websites and info-systems and is built around a native API architecture, caching and smart resource management. WWW is a compact framework that does not include libraries and bloated features and is developed keeping lightweight speed and optimizations in mind.

Note that WWW Framework is currently in BETA and it is not recommended for production use yet.

Latest version of WWW Framework can be grabbed here.

Feature list of WWW Framework 2.0.7:

• Modern API-focused framework
• Secure API requests with input and token and key-based authentication
• Dynamically loaded Hierarchical MVC objects through Factory pattern
• API returns XML, CSV, JSON, HTML, native PHP and other data formats
• Compressed data output with Deflate and Gzip
• Input and output data is fully UTF-8
• PDO-specific database controller for general-use database connections
• Smart Index gateway that handles all HTTP requests
• Full cache control for all types of dynamic and static requests
• View and URL controllers that support multiple languages and clean URL’s
• On-demand dynamic image resizer and basic image editor
• On-demand resource compressing, unifying and minifying
• jQuery JavaScript framework supported
• Automatic sitemap.xml and robots.txt generation
• Optional 256bit Rijndael CBC data communication encryption
• Installation-specific MVC class and resource overrides
• API wrapper classes that make server to server API communication easy
• Request limiter that can block HTTP requests under various conditions
• Request logger that can be used for detailed performance grading of HTTP requests
• Backup, update and filesystem maintenance tools
• Compatibility script that tests support for server setup
• Supports Apache and Nginx servers in Linux and Windows environments
• Licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License Version 3

Documentation and repositories

Documentation about how to set up a system and use the API, as well as tutorials are available here. Tutorial about how to build a basic web service is already available and tutorial about how to build a simple website will be released soon.

Mercurial and Git repositories are available for developers who are interested in following the development at SourceForge, GitHub, Google Code and BitBucket. All repositories are updated as new versions are released. It is also a good idea to follow latest development and news of WWW Framework at Google+, Facebook and Twitter.

Is WWW Framework fast?

Micro-framework has its benefits! The following chart shows the performance of frameworks with and without APC extension supported. Also note that the chart has a no-cache version of WWW framework listed, which basically has WWW Framework running without internal optimizations. It was included to test the difference between WWW Framework’s internal optimizations.

Benchmark chart (click to see full chart)

• Benchmark was run on a dual-core WAMP setup over the period of two nights
• WAMP setup was EasyPHP 5.3.8.1 and The Uniform Server 8.3.1
• Pylot was used to do the HTTP load benchmarking
• Framework setup and installation for known frameworks was provided by PHPMark
• Tested frameworks WWW Framework 1.9.6, Yii Framework 1.1.4, CodeIgniter 1.7.2, Kohana 3.2.0, CakePHP 1.3.4 and Zend Framework 1.10.8
• Every benchmark-run was 20 seconds long, every framework was tested ten times with both APC turned on and off
• Apache was reset before each benchmark run and log files were deleted
• Sessions and output compression by Apache was not used
• The results below show averaged results from EasyPHP and The Uniform Server for non-APC tests and APC tests were only done on The Uniform Server
• Benchmark scores varied most when APC was on. Without APC each benchmark run was within 1% of other scores of the same benchmark
• While PHPMark includes Symfony 1.4.8, it was unable to be tested due to it crashing the testing environments Apache when run
• WWW Framework running without internal cache (‘no cache’ on the chart) means that it does do any internal optimization and was used for testing purposes

WWW Framework

I am proud to present the first complete release of WWW Framework. Goal of the project has been to create an API (Application Programming Interface) focused framework which can be used to build user-interface independent software which can be controlled from any type of interface required (be it a simple website or a mobile app). The result is this, an API-focused web and infosystems PHP micro-framework.

Project has been launched with full documentation as well as first tutorial that explains how to build a simple web service with WWW.

You can follow news related to the project on various social media channels Google+, Facebook, Twitter and source code is officially published at SourceForge, Google Code as well as BitBucket. Repository that is used is Mercurial and you can easily subscribe to it or pull the latest version.

Summary description of the project:

WWW is a PHP micro-framework that is built loosely on model-view-control architecture and factory method design pattern. It is made for web services, websites and info-systems and is built around a native API architecture, caching and smart resource management. WWW is a compact framework that does not include libraries and bloated features and is developed keeping lightweight speed and optimizations in mind.

The package comes by default with a view controller and a gateway intended for website functionality with clean URLs. Framework also incorporates a front-end JavaScript controller.

Please make sure to read documentation about how to set up a system and use the API. Complete documentation with detailed tutorials are available here at https://sourceforge.net/p/www-php/wiki/Home/

Mercurial repository is available for developers who are interested in following the development.

Waher-style Theme

If you are using Windows and use Notepad++ as one of your main source-code editors and happen to be a web developer then you might just love this.  I originally developed this for personal use for I was unhappy with other themes or found them a little inconsistent across different web development languages. By now I have used this theme in Notepad++ for more than a year now.

Thanks to this being shared in reddit, Twitter and Facebook, it has been downloaded more than ten thousand times in one day.

It is recommended to use this theme with Consolas font.

You can download the theme archive HERE (*.rar archive) or the theme XML directly HERE (right click and save-as). Preview is available here.

Features:

• Comfortable color scheme with a dark background and eye-friendly colors for working long hours
• The styles used are intended for a web developer and cover most common files associated with web development
• Supports Notepad++ styles for following languages and files: CSS, HTML, *.ini files, JavaScript, PHP, SQL and XML.
• Covered by GNU Free License, you can modify and redistribute it in however way you like.
• Some support for Java and Python files (recently added, might require some testing)

Install:

1. Unpack the *.rar archive into your Notepad++ installation directory under subfolder /themes/
2. Open Notepad++
3. Go to Settings -> Style Configurator
4. Select Waher-style from Select Theme dropdown
5. Click Save & Close

I hope this theme will serve you as well as it has served me!

WebViewApp

I have only recently become curious about developing for Android phones. As a web developer the most important thing for me was to provide a way to bridge the gap between web applications and native applications.

Free and open source WebViewApp application is a simple base setup for developing Android applications that communicate with web services. WebViewApp is released as open source and developers can use this base application to build their own fully functional web applications in Android.

This application is as bare bones as possible and includes commented code and some examples.

Following features are included:

• Cookie management (application stores cookies)
• Cache management (application stores cache based on web service cache lifetime and maintains it when user is not using the app)
• Javascript interface (Web service can execute commands in Java and vice versa, such as for scripting hardware keys or executing alerts from web service, displayed in Android.)
• Contained URL’s (Web service only opens its own URL’s in app, every other URL is launched in browser.)
• Online Checks (App checks if user is online, if not then shows an offline page with an option to continue and reload where user left off once internet is back)
• Sending custom user agent string to web service for testing if web service is used through Android app. Also includes a (possibly) unique device ID and application version for update checks.
• Can load local HTML pages that uses local resources
• Can be installed on SD card.
• Can save settings and preferences
• Can set background services and timed services
• Can start a service at boot time
• Can make HTTP connections to online API’s
• Can use private and public file system, read and write files
• Can use SQLite database

This application shows that it is possible to create very extensive Android applications while relying mostly on HTML and JavaScript user interface, which makes it much easier to port to other systems or create a counterpart to browser version of a website.

Please note that there is no ‘guide’ on how to change the base application into your own new application, but source package does include a short overview of all the necessary modifications. Basic knowledge of Android and web development is recommended.

The bare-bones application can be downloaded from Android Market with its name ‘WebViewApp’ or from Android Market.

Source code can be downloaded from here. This includes source code for both the Android app as well as the web service.

VERSION HISTORY:

v1.12 Database and file system examples, HTTP request examples
v1.11 Starting service at boot time
v1.10 Background services and timed services
v1.09 Notifications, settings and preferences
v1.08 Local image test for local HTML
v1.07 Activity checks and local file support
v1.06 Better examples and descriptions
v1.05 Possibility to keep previous scroll position
v1.04 Back button now works with POST variables
v1.03 Fix for back button in certain conditions
v1.02 Reload page now uses Javascript interface
v1.01 Fix for no-internet reload page
v1.00 Release

Electronic Payments

E-payment systems and bank services are everyday and common in Estonia, but both developers and companies, who implement e-payments to websites, tend to ask large sums of money for solutions that should be relatively simple. Having developed e-payment systems for years, I had not put together a single solution for this very common problem until now, when Estonia has adopted Euro as its main currency. This solution is released open source, under LGPL license.

Please note that while this e-payment system is now considered stable and has not run into major problems ever since it was released, some of the connections have been tested more often than others and it is still recommended to test the implementation and make sure it works accordingly before going live.

E-payment systems and Bank e-services that are supported with this solution:

Swedbank (Estonia)
SEB (Estonia)
Sampo (Estonia & Finland)
Nordea (Estonia & Finland)
Estcard (Estonian credit card web service, Mastercard, Visa, etc)

Requirements:

Solution is built with PHP and requires PHP support. The website or service that implements this solution should be modern and utilize UTF-8 for data encoding. This e-payment system assumes that it gets its data as UTF-8 and acts accordingly. This system may not work properly if website is not encoded in UTF-8. OpenSSL support is also required from the web server for some epayment profiles. Multibyte String extension support is required for certain UTF-8 calculations.

Files descriptions:

config.epay.php – Configuration file for each profile. This also includes testing environment access informatin, if that profile has it (read the comments). Whenever setting up a e-payment link, this file should be configured accordingly.

class.epay.php – Main class, this file also calls the configuration file and expects the file to be in the same directory as the class.epayments.php file. This file should not be edited, unless necessary for some reason.

gate.epay.php – This is gateway file that is used to submit data to the bank service or parse the result from the service.

example-submit.php – This is example file, which generates the form that submits order data to gateway and gateway then submits it to the bank.

example-return.php – This is example return page, which receives returned information from bank.

Example:

This package has a working example that is easy and quick to set-up. Package includes SEB bank e-service testing environment. The only thing you have to do, to get the example up and running, is download the package below and upload it to your website under root or subfolder. For example, if you upload the files to:

http://www.example.com/epayment/

Then you have to change only two configuration settings in example-submit.php file, related to order information and return URL. Using the previous example, the lines should be changed accordingly:

line 22. $config['gateway-url']=’http://www.example.com/epayment/gate.epay.php’;
line 23. $config['return-url']=’http://www.example.com/epayment/example-return.php’;

Don’t forget to change the example.com website address to your own website address. Nothing else needs to be changed to test if the class works.

From example to Live implementation:

The example runs on ‘seb-est’ (SEB Estonia) profile. To use another bank, such as Swedbank, you need to assign correct payment-type before generating the form (like in example-submit.php file). Then you also need to assign proper values to config.epay.php to the profile. The settings in configuration file are commented and self-explanatory. It is important to note though that some e-payment services offer no testing environments and other epayment services cannot even be tested without the testing environment being set up by the other side first (such as the case with Estcard solutions).

Download:

waher.net e-payments solution 1.4 stable

Other notes:

As BETA, this solution does not check for errors in every location and there may be quirks as a result. These will be ironed out in future versions. Please report any bugs or problems you find either here in comments or personally to my e-mail kristo@waher.net

Version history:

1.4 stable
20.04.2011
Minor change for Nordea, switching the language keyword (estonian and english were switched)

1.3 beta
04.03.2011
VK_AUTO requests did not work with some banks, gateway now attempts a cURL request to remedy that, if cURL is enabled.

1.2 beta
31.01.2011
VK_AUTO assigned for ipizza profiles (Sampo, SEB and Swedbank) for automatic pings on success URL

1.1 beta
13.01.2011
Sampo profile now works properly, taking into account UTF-8 characters

1.0 beta
11.01.2011
First release

This example has a few limits, that is you can easily confuse it by clicking on two tile locations in a row. But in general it works and what I will be using this for will be something a bit different, so this limitation was of no concern to me. However the entire pathfinding calculation takes place on PHP backend. Each map is essentially a square (currently a limitation of pathfinder, but can easily be tweaked) and stored as an associative array, every tile in that array like this:

$map['1x1']['weight']=1.0;

The first key is the coordinate of the single map tile and the weight key is used to store weight of this map tile for calculations. Nothing else is needed (and an example is provided in the files below). For actual game purposes or whatnot you can store additional information on that very map as long as the coordinate and weight are assigned as shown in the example. For example, in my own tech-demo I also store the graphic tile used in the map array.

Finding the actual path is just as simple:

$map=getMap();
require(‘class.pathfinder.php’);
$path=new PathFinder(); //Create new pathfinder object
$path->setOrigin(1,1); //Set the start location
$path->setDestination(20,20); //Set the destination
$path->setMap($map); //Assign the map to use for calculations
$result=$path->returnPath(); //Returns an array of all the walked steps

Working example, as well as commented pathfinder class is available below:

Download the class and example file here

Please note that this is not a definitive pathfinder. It only takes into account one square ahead and on very large maps I am sure there are more ideal solutions. But for your basic browser based game this is a good starting point and I learned a lot by creating it. This is also easy to expand based on your needs.

If you have any other questions, let me know.

The code is shared entirely free for personal or commercial use.

Cheers!