Hi Simon,
SiCo007 schrieb:
I am kind of in the same boat here, I find it frustrating that ZF doesn't
handle or suggest a use of models. I fully understand why mind you now I
have investigated, a model is essentially what anyone wants it to be!!
Well, that's a very differently handled issue.
Most PHP programmers treat models like the connection of a db to
controllers. But from a design view they could be virtually anything,
indeed they are a *Model* of your requirements. And for that how you
would integrate a model of everything into a general framework like ZF?
You can't.
It seems to me that a lot is put into the controller in the docs and the
framework as a whole but that most of the actual work should actually happen
in the model!
It should, yes. A controller is best viewed as an application that uses
stuff from the model. If you create another client beside HTTP, like a
CLI it should use the same functionality out of the model.
That's the easiest way to see a model and a controller: the model is the
core of your application, the controller is just your application layer,
your API to the core.
I would like to see a base class and maybe a best practice / example in the
docs as a getting started, it's been my biggest hurdle choosing what
metodology (read opinion) to follow over model useage!!
Like I said before: there a billion different applications and many
thousand clients possible.
So how you could make a base class for every one of it?
You easily can't.
Google for stuff like modelling domains, layered architectures and
application design.
A three-layer application could be seen as:
Top: UI, Webpage, CLI, API, Whatever client
Middle (Core): your concrete application
Bottom: Infrastructure (DB, Filesystem, Mails, XML,...)
That's a minimum layered application.
If you want to know where a specific method or class belongs in, you
could ask yourself: "Do all clients have to use this method?". If the
answer is yes, it is a core functionality and belons to the middle layer.
If there are differences betweens clients (e.g. a CLI can't use web
forms) it belongs to the top layer. That's the responsibility of a
controller (or helper classes) of MVC then, and to delegate the work and
make calls to the core.
