Software Architecture¶
The SlaxWeb Framework is built with the dependency injection container pattern. This provides you with simple loading of all the components, and provides you with more possibilities to consume 3rd party libraries, or your code. But as with anything you are not required to do so, there are always different ways to do so, but since there are too many possibilities, we can not cover them all in our documentation, so we will focus only on using the DIC.
Services and Properties¶
The DIC or container holds two types of data, properties, which are just simple data values, like strings, integers, arrays, and so on, and services, which are objects of components, classes, libraries etc. that are automatically instantiated when you or the Framework first calls them, and takes care of the called components, classes, libraries, and so on, dependencies on its own, so you do not have to worry about this.
The container is passed in to your code as one of the input parameters from the router, and is of instance \SlaxWeb\Bootstrap\Application. For more information, please read the Router Component documentation. The container in use is not developed by our team, but rather a 3rd party container is used. You can find its documentation here.
To distinguish between a service and a property, the Framework appends ”.service” to the name of the service, and no appendix is used for properties. Some services are also defined as factories, such services have the ”.factory” appendix.
Full list of services and factories:
- TBD
Full list of properties:
- TBD
Providers¶
Providers are classes that define further services and properties for the application, the Framework already defines a couple of Providers, and you can define your own, should you wish to.
The Providers have to be defined in the \App\Provider namespace and in the app/Provider/ directory in order to be autoloaded. For more information on how to write providers for the container, please refer to the pimple documentation for writing providers. Of course, as with everything else, you can freely move the Provider definitions into a different directory and/or namespace, just do not forget to update the autoloader. Please see Changing Namespace Autoloading Settings for more information.
When the provider is autoloaded, it still needs to be registered with the container. The Framework will do this for you automatically. All you need to do is add the class name to the providerList in the app.conf configuration file. For more information please refer to the Config Component.