twister

Twister is a fast and light-weight micro-framework component library

Another definition of this code release would be;

Twister is a set of fast and light-weight components around which a framework can be written

There is also a skeleton application based on this code!

At the heart of the framework, sits a very flexible, simple and elegant Inversion-of-Control (IoC) Container. In fact, there are NO global variables, NO define's, NO pipeline, NO Kernel and NO App; just the Container. The Container controls the entire flow of code (except routing), with a custom execute() function (written by you); which is actually just an anonymous callback function inside the Container, called from the Front Controller (index.php); even the name of that function can be changed in the config file. ie. There is NO pre-programmed flow of the program or hard-coded Kernel/App. Most things are handled/registered with the IoC Container, objects are pre-configured and lazy-loaded on request/use only!

Along with the Container, comes a very flexible and fast router (inside the Request class). I consider this router to be THE fastest router I've tested, with the same functionality. It includes the ability to filter by method (GET/POST), and optional parameters like /user/{id}[/{name}] Another somewhat unique capability is the ability to pre-define the patterns associated with named parameters eg. id=>\d+ So everytime you specify {id}, {date}, {uuid} etc. in the routes, the pre-configured patterns are used, or you can specify custom patterns with {id:[0-9]+} or {id:uuid} where uuid=>[A-F0-9-]+ etc.    Two design choices make the router fast:

• Everything is configured/loaded from a config array (which is usually cached by APC/Xcode/PHP7)
• The router splits the request uri by '/', doing an isset array lookup for the first path segment
• The router only takes further action after the first segment (eg. /admin/, /login etc.) is resolved

Although Twister is a fully functional and useable framework (based on my personal framework), it's more a proof-of-concept for me to demonstrate my capabilities and design decisions.

My main design philosophy is: Configuration over Code/Convention; I would rather write a large array with pre-configured properties/routes/Closures etc., and have the benefit of a pre-cached array (PHP7 includes a built in cache, or XCode/APC), without the overhead of hundreds of (unecessary) ->add(...) function calls. I just see very little benefit to writing a ton of ->add(route) commands when the entire route layout of your website can be loaded once. One argument for writing ->add(...) calls in the Container and Router is input validation, but I would argue that you can still do it by parsing a single pre-configured array. One large pre-configured array with default Routes and Container objects could serve as the 'base' for default options. Additional Routes/DI/IoC objects could be added/modified at run-time. Also, I ONLY use PHP array based configuration files, because they are cached natively by PHP; any other configuration files (.ini/YAML/JSON) have to be interpreted/parsed or a custom cache has to be invented.

Benchmarks:

All tests were done with a skeleton hello world application on the same PC. Laravel and Symfony were NOT configured to establish a database connection, while Twister WAS! With a database connection, Symfony dropped to 9-12 requests per second, and Laravel 12-16 rps, Twister is running anywhere from 50x-100x faster than Symfony and Laravel

ab -t 30 http://laravel/

Complete requests:      198
Requests per second:    6.59 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       151.765 [ms] (mean)

memory_get_usage(): 6,621,416
memory_get_usage(true): 2,097,152
memory_get_peak_usage(): 6,691,272
memory_get_peak_usage(true): 2,097,152

ab -t 30 http://symfony/

Complete requests:      95
Requests per second:    3.15 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       317.717 [ms] (mean)

memory_get_usage(): 10,887,352
memory_get_usage(true): 4,194,304
memory_get_peak_usage(): 11,168,984
memory_get_peak_usage(true): 4,194,304

ab -t 30 http://twister/

Complete requests:      911
Requests per second:    30.35 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       32.952 [ms] (mean)

memory_get_usage(): 858,848
memory_get_usage(true): 2,097,152
memory_get_peak_usage(): 1,049,528
memory_get_peak_usage(true): 2,097,152