chindogu.php

A one file high performance MVC PHP micro framework.

What is it?

Chindogu is basically Codeigniter in one file of 50 lines. But much faster.

Fast, how fast?

Very. It's so lightweight, that is probably the fastest MVC PHP Framework.

Benchmarks

Running Phalcon's benchmark suite with AB (Apache Bench), chindogu.php scores the highest in the hello world test.

1. chindogu.php: 1345.88 #Requests/sec (mean)
2. phalcon 1.3.3: 1327.99 #Requests/sec (mean)
3. yii 1.1.13: 530.82 #Requests/sec (mean)
4. codeigniter 2.1: 343.1 #Requests/sec (mean)
5. kohanna 3.2: 271.60 #Requests/sec (mean)

Installation

1. Download the latest version from here.
2. Unzip and copy the files of the folder.
3. Paste them on Htdocs (for Apache) or your server's folder.

How does it work?

File Structure

/controllers
/models
/views
index.php
chindogu.php
config.php

Routing

The same Convention over Configuration scheme of Codeigniter is used.

Routes match one to one to controllers and actions.

In this url:

http://example.com/watch/video/id

watch is the controller, video is the action and id is a parameter for the action (you can have multiple parameters like http://example.com/watch/video/id/param2/param3).

Controllers

Controllers are just php files in the controllers folder, that define a class with a bunch of functions. Each funtion corresponds to an action.

For the previous examples, we would have a /controllers/watch.php file like this:

Class Watch extends Controller {
  static function video($id) {
    // some php code
  }
}

or like this:

Class Watch extends Controller {
  static function video($id, $param2, $param3) {
    // some php code
  }
}

The route, file name and class name must be the same (in this case watch).

Views

Views are just php files with embedded html.

You could have a view located in /views/hello_view.php with something like this:

<p>Hello World</p>

And you would use it from a controller like this:

Class Watch extends Controller {
  static function video($id) {
    echo Watch::view('hello_view');
    // echo Controller::view('hello_view') you can also use the parent controller class
  }
}

You can send variables to the view, so a view like this:

<p><?= "The video is $video_id";></p>

Would be called from the controller like this:

Class Watch extends Controller {
  static function video($id) {
    echo Watch::view('hello_view', array('$video_id' => $id));
  }
}

Models

Models use PDO with parametrized sql (parameters are optional). Only one function is available, named 'exec'.

A model in /models/Watch_Model.php would look like this:

class Watch_Model extends Model {
	function get_videos() {
		return $this->exec('SELECT * FROM videos');
	}
	function get_video($id) {
	  return $this->exec('SELECT * FROM videos WHERE id = :video_id', array(':video_id' => $id));
	}
}

And would be called from a controller like this:

Class Watch extends Controller {
  static function video($id) {
    $watch_model = Watch::model('Watch_Model'); // you can also use Controller instead of Watch
    $video = $watch_model->get_video($id);
    echo Watch::view('hello_view', array('video' => $video));
  }
}

Again, the file name and the class name have to match.

index.php

This file just loads chindogu.php. It's structured like this for flexibility (you can do whatever you want before and after the framework is loaded). Alternatively, you can just rename chindogu.php to index.php and have just one file.

config.php

Here you define you DB credentials and some default values (and everything you want, secret api keys, etc).

.htaccess

Redirects every request to index.php (except for files, like your css or js) and makes the pretty urls possible (otherwise, every url would be prepended with index.php, like http://example.com/index.php/watch/video/1.

Acknowledgements

This is heavily inspired by CodeIgniter and PIP.