README

The package was designed to resolve a common part of most web application: users messages. The package cames with a extensible database structure which allows you to use the package for problems such as private messages between your users or a place where all your users can write their ideas.

About

This package was intended to be used as a storage sollution for messages in a application with instant messages chat delivered through websockets. The websocket server at some moment will save the conversation using this package.

Installation

Currently only a installation guide for Laravel 4 framework are provided in this documentation.

Run database migrations

php artisan migrate --bench=softservlet/forum

Add package service provider in your app/config/app.php

Softservlet\Forum\Providers\ForumServiceProvider

Implement the ActorInterface in your application.

The base idea behind this package is to send messages between entities. We call this entity an Actor. In order to use this package, you must define in your application who is the actor.

The actor usually will send messages.

Somewhere in your models, you should implement ActorInterface from Softservlet\Forum\Actor\ActorInterface. A code sample for this might be:

<?php

use Softservlet\Forum\Actor\ActorInterface;

class User implements ActorInterface
{

	private $userId;

	public function __construct($userId)
	{
		$this->userId = $userId;
	}

	public function getId()
	{
		return $this->userId;
	}

	//more about your user 
}

Once you've implemented ActorInterface, bind this to your application service providers. In your application service provider write: App::bind('Softservlet\Forum\Actor\ActorInterface', 'Your\Namespace\To\User');

Implement ActorRepositoryInterface The package needs to get instances to your objects which implements ActorInterface to be able to send messages.

You need to implement: Softservlet\Forum\Repositories\ActorRepositoryInterface

This interface contain a method find($id), which should return an instance of ActorInterface. Here you should retrieve your user from database or from where you've stored it.

A sample code of this implementation might be:

<?php

use Softservlet\Forum\Repositories\ActorRepositoryInterface;

class UserRepository implements ActorRepositoryInterface
{
	public find($id)
	{
		//get details about your user and create
		//a instance of it
		return new User($id, $params);
	}
}

then register the binding from this class to Softservlet\Forum\Repositories\ActorRepositoryInterface;

More about Laravel binding on Laravel documentation.

How it works

The workflow is quite simple:

An actor sends a message to a Thread
All actors which written or subscribed to that thread can fetch messages.

How to use

Creating messages and threads

First thing when you want to send a message using package is to define who will send it. As we've seen above, you need to implement ActorRepositoryInterface. Create an instance of an ActorInterface

   //this object will implements ActorRepositoryInterface
   $actorRepository = new ActorRepository(); 	

   //let's say that we want to send a message from a user with id equals with 1
   $actor = $actorRepository->find(1);

Create a thread(if not exists) where the message will be sent.

   $threadRepository = new Softservlet\Forum\Repositories\ThreadRepository();
   //create a instance of a thread with id equals with 10
   $thread = $threadRepository->find(10);

Create a new message. Messages creation are done by MessageRepository object, defined in Repositories\MessageRepository class. Create a instance of this object and call create() method with the parameters described bellow:
ThreadInterface $thread
ActorInterface $actor
string $text
int $timestamp

   $messageRepository = new Softservlet\Forum\Repositories\MessageRepository();
   $message = $messageRepository->create($thread, $actor, "my message", time());

Getting messages and threads

Todo

Send messages with another data than strings