Nested componentization for advanced Web portal solutions Svebor Prstačić, dipl. ing., Dr. sc. Ivan Voras, Dr. sc. Mario Žagar

Agenda  Mission and features  Implementation  Future work 2ITI 2011

Mission  Social networks and/or features are unavoidable  Implementing the same features over and over again is common and inefficient  Not reusable without standardized interfaces Problem  Components are incompatible  Components cannot exist without the framework  Frameworks are incompatible and inseparable from parent applications  Many different frameworks Mission: create a reusable framework 3ITI 2011

The framework, features  Framework easily reusable  Easy component development  PHP, Smarty, object-oriented, MVC  Database access  Components can nest and are easy to reuse  Components oblivious to their siblings  Type  Inner architecture  Communication with the host application 4ITI 2011

Features  Components should be usable as plug-in applications e.g.:  Attach a photo gallery to a blog post  Enable commenting for a news article  Recursive usage  Allowed but not handled  We call them extensions 5ITI 2011

Features ITI 20116

Features ITI  One line extension reuse  As easy as HTML tag reuse  Provide a context  Enable extensions to hook without relational dependencies  Provide user data  Provide permissions

Implementation - MVC ITI  Model  Where the code is  How the PHP files are named  View  Smarty template  Plug-ins, predefined template variables  Action link URLs  Forms  Permissions  Localization strings  JavaScript  Unified and minimized

Implementation - MVC ITI  Controller  An abstract class  Every extension must have one  Communication with the framework (execution, context data)  Main purpose - define callable actions  Called if necessary, depending on user input  Objects are cached on the server  Properties retained between calls  Can improve performance

Implementation – execution context ITI  Determines how and what a component should render e.g.:  CMS – load stuff on a page  Blog application – load stuff for the current blog  Extensions  Partially inherited from parent (hook data)  Partially provided by the framework from the host app (user, permissions…)  Creates unique extension instances  Usage examples  {v2ext _name=‘’Comments’’ _content_type_name=‘’news_article’’ _content_id=‘’$news.news_id’’}  {v2ext _name=‘’Thumbslike’’ _content_type_name=‘’comment’’ _content_id=‘’$comment.id’’}

Implementation - hook data ITI  Consists of data type and payload data  Accessed through UniqueID objects  Framework handles instantiation  Every controller is provided a UniqueID reference  Downsides  No relational dependency  Data changes, cleanup?  Solved with event support:  Hinders our one-line extension reuse goal: fireContentDeletedEvent($news_id, ‘’news_article’’);

Future work ITI  Improve implementation  Identify integration interfaces and integration workflow  Framework - triggered events  Dynamic hooks

Thank you. ITI