This is just a quickie. I had spent some time creating a routing system in PHP for services. The goal was to bypass .htaccess or a vhost configuration file. Basically, I wanted to map endpoints (HTTP methods + paths) to PHP methods. My goal at the time was something similar to Sinatra and/or MVC2 routes.

He shows examples from both the Sinatra documentation and a code example from a MVC2 project that uses the same ideas. His first show with PHP proved to not quite be the right way, so he opted for a combination of Apache mod_rewrite and some PHP to take the mapped values and execute. It also includes support fo rthe "X-HTTP-Method-Override" header if you happen to need it.

I'm currently looking for a good PHP framework to do a new project. I recently used Kohana 3 at on a project for a client but I needed something lighter and having used Sinatra and Padrino previously but needing it PHP based I did the next natural step - searched for PHP Sinatra clones.

There's four frameworks that made the list - all in varying states of development:

• Limonade
• Fat Free Framework
• Slim
• Fitzgerald

Indeed, the quality of Rails, CakePHP, Django, and Catalyst notwithstanding, some developers have rebuffed the large frameworks, citing bulk and complexity, to create smaller and simpler alternatives. Dubbed micro-frameworks-think microcomputer versus mainframe-the tools shape incoming requests into something manageable and leave the rest up to you. Choose your design pattern, object-relational mapper (ORM), and rendering technology, and off you go. As you'll see, a working Web application can be composed in less than ten lines of code in a single source file.

He covers the Ruby framework first (Sinatra) and Limonade next. The framework takes incoming requests and maps them into the developed code. It works like a basic MVC-formatted framework - the request comes in with an action and is sent to a method by the same name. You can use wildcards in the URI, regular expression matching, views, templates and it includes error handling support and configuration option support.