Prepare the Framework

Note

This section is somewhat outdated and may be documented differently elsewhere already, but you should still read it to successfully complete the Getting started guide.

With the clean installation of the Framework you get a fully functional micro-framework, where you have to take care of everything, from database connections, session handling, and so on. But the Framework provides you with many installable components. To see a full list of components, please refer to the Components page.

This section of the documentation will teach you the basics around components and how to install them. We will also install all the components that we will require in order to get this example application running.

What are components?

The SlaxWeb Framework is composed with many different components. A Framework component is basically a small part of the Framework. Some components are essentials for the Framework to function, like a Router, while it can function just fine without some of the components, like a Session component. The clean installation of the Framework already includes the following uninstallable components:

• Bootstrap
• Config
• Logger
• Hooks
• Router
• Slaxer

While this is enough to get started with application development, there are other components available to simplify tasks, like handling sessions, database operations, templating, and so on. You may ask yourself, why not include all the components into the Framework, and not have me worry about what to install and what not. This would be a valid move, but the core Framework would such be polluted with components that you will not need for the development of your application, replacing of a component might be more complicated if completely possible without hauling the unused component behind, and would probably come without a tool that simplifies the installation of these components.

What we will need

We are developing a simple news website, where we want to save our news into a database table, and present the saved ones on a page. For this we will need the View component to simplify templating, and the Database component so we can actually store and retrieved our news.

Installing the components

To make your life easier, Framework comes with a nice tool, slaxer (pronounced as slacker) from the Slaxer component. slaxer provides many different functionalities, but at this moment we are most interested in the component installation functionality, which will let us install components. Lets go ahead and install our first component:

./slaxer component:install view

That’s it, slaxer will try to find and install the component for you, and check if there are available sub-components for the installing component. To find out more about sub-components please refer to the Components page. We do not require a sub-component in this example application, so make sure you select None when asked to install a sub-component. Now we just need to install the Database component:

./slaxer component:install database

Follow the on-screen instructions and once again, but here, you are required to install a sub-component. In this guide we will use the basic database-pdo sub-component. Now we have the Framework prepared, and we can start with our example application development.