Aura.Micro -- Experimental Replacement for Silex

Micro-frameworks have gotten a lot of attention in the PHP community over the last year. Many people are familiar with Silex, the extremely popular micro-framework built on top of Symfony Components. There’s something really elegant about the way you can write a quick little application with a micro-framework.

I was recently working on a small project that used Silex. As I browsed my vendor folder, I realized how much extra “stuff” I had inherited with Silex. There were a bunch of other components required when all I wanted was some quick and easy routing, micro-framework style.

When I think about going lean I always find myself coming back to Aura. Micro-frameworks are not a new to idea to Aura, so I wondered if I could take the elegance and ease of Silex by wrapping up Aura.Router and exposing it through a similar API. The result is Aura.Micro, a light wrapper for Aura.Router to get a Silex-style API.

A couple of things are worth noting:

• First, this is just an experiment and I had no intention of 100% parity with Silex. Silex is built onto Pimple, mixing the ideas of a micro-framework and a service locator. Aura.Micro is just a micro-framework for quick and easy web application routing.

• Second, I very intentionally decided to make Aura.Router the only dependency for Aura.Micro. This means that rather than leverage Aura.Signal or Aura.Di (both really awesome libraries!), or even some other Event and Dependency Injection libraries, I added a super-light callback system to provide methods like $app->before() and $app->after() and $app->finish() and $app->error(). I completely ignored pieces like the Silex service providers.

So what does Aura.Micro look like in practice?

<?php
$app = new Aura\Micro\Micro();

$app->before(function(){
    print "Running before" . PHP_EOL;
});

$app->after(function(){
    print "Running after" . PHP_EOL;;
});

$app->finish(function(){
    print "Running finish" . PHP_EOL;
});

$app->error(function(){
    print "Error" . PHP_EOL;
});

$app->get("/test", function(){
    print "Testing" . PHP_EOL;
});

$app->get("/hello/{:world}", function($world) use($app){
    print "Hello {$world}" . PHP_EOL;
});

$app->run();

You can clone Aura.Micro from GitHub or drop the following into your composer.json file:

{
    "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "vcs",
            "url": "http://github.com/stanlemon/aura-micro"
        }
    ],
    "require": {
        "stanlemon/aura-micro": "*"
    }
}

Have ideas on how to improve this little wrapper? Add an issue or send over a pull request!

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