README

Kipchak by Mamluk

What Kipchak is?

Kipchak is an API Development Kit (or ADK) written in PHP to rapidly build APIs. It's built on years of experience and managing APIs in production environments that handle thousands of concurrent requests. This kit has been put together to make it easy for our engineers to build and maintain such APIs. It's built on top of the Slim Framework and may be described as a packaged (and opinionated) implementation of Slim. It does not take anything away from Slim and you can still use anything within Slim with Kipchak.

OK, that's enough. How do I see it in action?

This repository is for the core ADK. To get started with Kipchak and see it in action, head over to https://github.com/mam-luk/kipchak-template.

Not so fast, I want to learn more. What Kipchak is not?

Kipchak is not a framework like Symfony or Laravel. In fact, it's built on the Slim Framework. Why? Because Slim is fast and efficient and has a much lower footprint (memory, processing and size) than Symfony and Laravel, which, whilst having their merits, have a much larger memory and processing footprint. Kipchak, however, borrows libraries from Symfony and Laravel to enable the ADK.

OK, so it's Slim. What do I get by using it?

You get everything (within our PHP ecosystem, not our NodeJS ecosystem) that we need to use at Mamluk (https://mamluk.net), Islamic Network (https://islamic.network) and 7x (https://7x.ax) to build APIs:

Super easy config management
Consistent bootstrapping, dependency and middleware injection
Seamless upgrades (unless core routing in a Slim upgrade changes)
Consistent upgrades if they can't be seamless - we always need to update multiple APIs, so there will be a way forward
The following components pre-installed and can be enabled / disabled via YAML files:
- Symfony Cache, pre-setup for Memached and File System Caching (Redis coming soon, perhaps)
- Configurable HTTP caching headers
- Doctrine DBAL and ORM, to connect to and deal with multiple RDBMS (yes, we thought through this with Propel, Atlas and Eloquent too, but settled on Doctrine. We'll share why at some point)
- A CouchDB Client for integration with CouchDB (a reliable, distributed, eventually consistent NoSQL database)
- Session Handling within Memcached or CouchDB
- OAuth 2 based authentication and authorisation with JWKS
- Key based authentication
- Consistent error and exception handling
- Laravel's HTTP client bundled in (which is a breath of fresh air if you use Guzzle regularly)
- Monolog for consistent logging
- A posture on how to handle routes, controllers, models and the general layout of your application
- Generation of OpenAPI specifications for your APIs from your code (using Swagger PHP)
- Object Mapping / Data Transfer Objects (with Valinor)
- Pre-configured testing tools (work in progress)
- A base Dockerfile with NGINX Unit or Apache as application servers

Where can I find Documentation how to use Kipchak?

On https://github.com/mam-luk/kipchak-template.

Great. Why on earth is this ADK called Kipchak? And who and what is a Mamluk?

Kipchak is the family within the Turkic world that rose to power as the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt in 1250. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamluk_Sultanate for more details. As the company is called Mamluk, it was only appropriate to call our main development toolkit Kipchak.

Credits and Thanks

Slim Framework
Symfony (for Symfony Cache and Doctrine)
Laravel for the HTTP client
Monolog
Team CuyZ for Valinor (Object Mapping / Data Trasnfer Objects)
Byran Horna for Slim Session

For a full list of packages within Kipchak, see https://github.com/mam-luk/kipchak/blob/master/composer.json#L14.

Who is Mamluk

Visit https://mamluk.net.

mamluk / kipchak

Maintainers

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