activecollab/retro

Library that ties together different bits needed to write a web app

dev-master 2025-03-30 06:30 UTC

Requires

• php: >=8.2
• activecollab/authentication: dev-master
• activecollab/baseline: ^3.0
• activecollab/databasemigrations: ^4.0
• activecollab/databasestructure: dev-master
• activecollab/eventsdispatcher: ^1.0
• activecollab/sitemap: dev-master
• activecollab/templatedui: dev-master
• akrabat/ip-address-middleware: ^2.1
• giggsey/libphonenumber-for-php: ^8.13
• php-di/php-di: ^6.3
• php-di/slim-bridge: ^3.2
• symfony/console: ^4.0||^5.0||^6.0
• vlucas/phpdotenv: ^5.0.0

Requires (Dev)

• friendsofphp/php-cs-fixer: 3.4.0
• nette/php-generator: ^4.0
• phpunit/phpunit: ~9.0

Suggests

• nette/php-generator: To run code generation commands

MIT

• Ilija Studen

README

Retro is a library that ties together different components that are needed to build web apps that use backend to generate all the content. It is named Retro because it lets us build apps like we did in early 2000s, but with far superior development experience. Wait, what? What was good about web application development back in early 2000s? Several things:

1. You create a file, and web server picks it up, no route to define.
2. Things make sense even without JavaScript, but JavaScript makes them so much better through progressive enhancement.
3. Database is the state, and HTML that server returns is rendered representation of that state at the moment.
4. No JSON between frontend and backend, web servers serve HTML, and browsers render it.
5. API as RPC, instead of every page begin an API endpoint.

Building blocks of Retro:

1. Sitemap enables file system based routing, provided by Sitemap package,
2. Form processing using a simple mechanism to capture data from forms, validate it, and re-render the form with errors when needed.

To be continued…

Project Structure

• /app/current/src - where application is being built
• /cache
• /config
• /logs
• /public/assets
• /public/index.php
• /test/unit/log
• /test/unit/src
• /test/unit/boostrap.php
• /upload
• .gitignore
• .php_cs.php
• .php_qc.php
• composer.json
• composer.lock
• phpunit.xml
• README.md
• VERSION

CRUD

To easily generate boilerplate code for entities, run following command in this sequence:

php app/current/bin/console.php retro:create_crud_service plural_entity_name BundleName

This command creates add, edit and delete services, as well as supporting result classes that can be recorded in service execution history.

php app/current/bin/console.php retro:create_crud_form plural_entity_name BundleName

This is not a requirement step, but it follows the naming convention that create_crud_controller command will pick up and use automatically.

php app/current/bin/console.php retro:create_crud_controller plural_entity_name BundleName

This command creates a set of controllers, one for working with collections of entities, and one for working with individual entities.