12 Years Later

Brian Bisaillon — Sun, 20 Nov 2016 21:08:31 -0000

About

This project is a code framework I developed for faster development of PHP web applications 12 years ago.

Design/Usage

The project was based on software design patterns such as Abstract factory, Builder, Factory method, Singleton, Chain of responsibility, Command, Front controller, MVC, Data access object and Data transfer object. It is useful for prototyping web applications using dynamic web pages on the server-side.

Addons

In this project, I use ADOdb in combination with DAO Factories to integrate with various databases.

For the template engine, I use Smarty to separate the presentation logic (CSS/XHTML) from the application logic (PHP code).

I also use Kses as an HTML/XHTML filter to remove unwanted HTML/XHTML elements and attributes, perform checks and avoid Cross-Side Scripting (XSS) attacks.

Finally, for encrypting sessions/cookies I use Crypt, Hash and Hmac techniques supported by mcrypt and Libmhash.

Latest Update

This latest release of phpwebtk-1.0.4-alpha was updated to work with PHP 7. It includes newer versions of ADOdb and Smarty. It also includes CKEditor as a replacement for the old FCKEditor but I didn't integrate it with any of the View templates. It is just there in case you want to add WYSIWYG editing capabilities to HTML/XHTML content. This latest release was tested on Linux Mint 18 since it had most of the components I needed to update the code.

Switching from CVS to Subversion

Brian Bisaillon — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 16:36:37 -0000

I plan to switch from CVS to Subversion and I will eventually move all of the old source code over to the new repository. In the meantime, any new source code will only be kept in the new repository so check up on it from time to time.

Back Into Action

Brian Bisaillon — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 16:14:56 -0000

I have been inactive on this project for quite some time due to health reasons. However, I am happy to report that my organ transplant surgery was a success and I shall resume development work on phpwebtk soon. This project is on the brink of reaching 3000 downloads and I think it's worth putting more effort into it.

In the next release, I plan to include updated versions of ADOdb for database abstraction, Mcrypt for encryption, Mhash for hashing, Kses for content filtering, eAccelerator (new) for opcode caching, Smarty for templating and FCKeditor (new) for WYSIWYG. I am also going to work on adding secure forms-based Authentication, adding a sample phpwebtk application, updating all of the documentation including the UML diagrams and creating tutorials.

I also did some profiling of phpwebtk and I found out that the 50ms load time issue I identified in the results of my benchmarks was due to ADOdb. I may have to only autoload the ADOdb libraries when it's necessary to reduce overall load times because loading ADOdb each time a request comes seems to be unfeasable. Why does it take 50ms to load ADOdb? Anyway, it probably should only be autoloaded when actual database requests are made. Then again, perhaps the newer version of ADOdb does not have this issue any longer but it'll have to be tested.

This is really all I want to focus on at this point because I want to get phpwebtk to the point where people can actually see an out-of-the-box application built with phpwebtk. Having said that, phpwebtk has evolved to be more of a framework that reuses the works of other popular PHP projects to be able to rapidly build applications.

Recent posts to news

12 Years Later

Switching from CVS to Subversion

Back Into Action