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What is Ephect ?

Effective Programming in Hybrid Environment using Components-based Templates.

It's a comprehensive solution that combines a lightweight PHP framework and a JavaScript library.

Ephect allows you to design backend pages and components a fluent way as well as web components.

It integrates a build process based on webpack.

Featured concepts

The components

Basically, components are custom HTML tags. All concepts of HTML tags on backend side are applicable to components except the naming convention: a component name must begin with a capital letter.

The logic of the component is coded in a simple funcion returning a template.

Example 1

Here is an open component that can surround children components or just HTML code.

The code would look like this:

It will render:

Example 2

A closed component to which we pass arguments:

The code would look like this:

It will render:

Cascading and reusing components

The components can be declared in cascade and the same component can be reused in each cascading component.

If we combine examples 1 and 2:

It will render:

The component Slot

A parent component with named placeholders can be inherited to change the content of its placeholders. The component in charge of managing placeholders is called Slot.

Here is a Mother component containing slots to be overriden:

And here is a component inheriting from Mother component:

It will render:

Hooks

Ephect introduces hooks to manage the data workflow. Additionally to well-known useEffect and useState hooks in the ReactJS realm, Ephect comes with 3 new basic hooks:

• useProps: to ensure a property can be used,
• useQueryArgument: to filter the value passed as parameter to the query,
• useSlot: to bind variables nested in slots to the parent component.

CLI tool egg

Ephect comes with a CLI tool called egg. The main feature of egg is to build the code of the whole application at once. This is done in one command: php egg build. The benefits of this approach are the errors management and the increase of velocity of the application.

Error handling

Every syntax error is handled as a fatal error which stops the compilation process. An explicit message is displayed on the console output to help you fix it quickly.

Headless page generator

The compiler parses the templates of every component owned by a page comprising the cascading components. Each component is translated from Ephect template code to pure functional PHP code and cached. The code of each component is light and fast to run.

Once the pages are prepared in cache, browsing them is as fast as possible. The only bottleneck that you should be aware of is the data resources calls.

Requirements

The minimal version of PHP needed for Ephect is 8.2.

You may also need to install some PHP extensions, if it's not done yes, like PDO/Sqlite, cUrl, Iconv, etc.

Install the framework

It's recommended to use the composer create-project command in order to get all the needed stuff.

There's a dedicated project you can find here ephect-io/create-app that will help you for a quick start.

Just do:

composer create-project ephect-io/create-app myproject

where myproject is the name of your project.

Install the sample application

Move to myproject directory and type:

php egg make:quickstart

You will see a app directory in which you will find the standard structure of an Ephect application and a public directory in which is stored the index.php.

Build the application

Using the PHP only context

If no issue is popping up on the console then you can generate your application outside the browser.

However, you first need to launch the embedded web server.

If you're running Windows, you need to type this:

php -S localhost:8888 -t src/public

otherwise, MacOS and Linux accept this syntax:

php egg serve

Open another terminal or another tab in your terminal and type:

php egg build

If you installed the QuickStart application as said previously, you should see something like this:

Compiling App ... 059ms
Compiling Home, querying http://localhost:8000/ ... 193ms
Compiling Hello, querying http://localhost:8000/hello/1/2 ... 027ms
Compiling World, querying http://localhost:8000/world?name=$1&lname=$2 ... 019ms
Compiling Matriochka0, querying http://localhost:8000/matriochka/1 ... 105ms
Compiling Info, querying http://localhost:8000/info ... 009ms
Compiling Callback, querying http://localhost:8000/callback ... 069ms

You will find the generated application in the directory cache.

The build process follows the routes with GET HTTP method, all other methods routes are built on web browser call.

Using the hybrid context: PHP + JavaScript

First, ensure NodeJS is installed and running with version 20 as a miminum. LTS/Iron is a good choice.

Once it's done, run:

npm install
npm run dev

If you installed the QuickStart application as said previously, you should see something like this:

> [email protected] dev
> sh scripts/dev.sh all

Building web components...
asset app.min.js 2.31 KiB [emitted] (name: main)
runtime modules 274 bytes 1 module
./app/JavaScripts/index.js 212 bytes [built] [code generated]
webpack 5.89.0 compiled successfully in 325 ms
'app/Assets/css/app.css' -> 'public/css/app.css'
'app/Assets/css/index.css' -> 'public/css/index.css'
'app/Assets/css/setup.css' -> 'public/css/setup.css'
'app/Assets/img/css/app.css' -> 'public/img/css/app.css'
'app/Assets/img/css/index.css' -> 'public/img/css/index.css'
'app/Assets/img/css/setup.css' -> 'public/img/css/setup.css'
'app/Assets/img/salamandra.png' -> 'public/img/salamandra.png'
'node_modules/human-writes/dist/web/human-writes.min.js' -> 'public/modules/human-writes.min.js'
Compiling App ... 059ms
Compiling Home, querying http://localhost:8000/ ... 193ms
Compiling Hello, querying http://localhost:8000/hello/1/2 ... 027ms
Compiling World, querying http://localhost:8000/world?name=$1&lname=$2 ... 019ms
Compiling Matriochka0, querying http://localhost:8000/matriochka/1 ... 105ms
Compiling Info, querying http://localhost:8000/info ... 009ms
Compiling Callback, querying http://localhost:8000/callback ... 069ms

The sample pages

The available page routes are:

A simple page with 2 children components; the first passes values to the second with useState hook.

• http://localhost:8000/

A sample to show how to manage parameters passed in the URL path.

• http://localhost:8000/hello/arg1/arg2

A sample to show how to manage parameters passed in the query string with a parent component for the style.

• http://localhost:8000/world?name=arg1&lname=arg2

A sample to show how to use the same component in cascade.

• http://localhost:8000/matriochka/arg1

A sample to show PHP info

• http://localhost:8000/info

A sample to show how to make a JavaScript callback with a PHP JSON response.

• http://localhost:8000/callback

To be continued...