Splash: a highly configurable PSR-15 router

What is Splash?

Splash is a PHP router. It takes an HTTP request and dispatches it to the appropriate controller.

Splash is a PSR-15 middleware
It is based on controllers and annotations (routes are declared as annotations in the controllers)
It is heavily optimized, relying on an underlying PSR-6 cache
It is a pure router. It is not a full-featured MVC framework. No views management, no model, only routing!
It promotes best practices. Controllers must be declared in a container-interop compatible container.
It is extensible.
It integrates with a high number of tools:
- With Mouf: this provides a friendly UI to generate controllers
- With Drupal (through Druplash, a module that adds a Splash-compatible MVC framework),
- With Wordpress (through Moufpress, a plugin that adds a Splash-compatible MVC framework),
- With Joomla (through Moufla, a plugin that adds a Splash-compatible MVC framework),
- With Magento (through Moufgento, a plugin that adds a Splash-compatible MVC framework),
... and it supports emoji routes! (mydomain.com/😍)

Clean controllers

Want to get a feeling of Splash? Here is a typical controller:

use TheCodingMachine\Splash\Annotations\Get;
use TheCodingMachine\Splash\Annotations\URL;

class MyController
{
    /**
     * @URL("/my/path")
     * @Get
     */
    public function index(ServerRequestInterface $request)
    {
        return new JsonResponse(["Hello" => "World!"]);
    }
}

Ok, so far, things should be fairly obvious to anyone used to PSR-7. The important parts are:

Routing is done using the @URL annotation. When a method has the @URL annotation, we call it an action.
Controllers are clean. They don't extend any "Splash" object (so are reusable in any other PSR-7 compatible MVC framework)
Actions can optionally have a @Get, @Post, @Put, @Delete annotation to restrict the response to some HTTP method.
Splash analyzes the action signature. If it finds a type-hinted ServerRequestInterface parameter, it will fill it the PSR-7 request object.
Actions must return an object implementing the PSR-7 ResponseInterface.

Even better

But Splash can provide much more than this.

Here is a more advanced routing scenario:

use TheCodingMachine\Splash\Annotations\Post;
use TheCodingMachine\Splash\Annotations\URL;
use Psr\Http\Message\UploadedFileInterface;

class MyController
{
    /**
     * @URL("/user/{id}")
     * @Post
     */
    public function index($id, $firstName, $lastName, UploadedFileInterface $logo)
    {
        return //...;
    }
}

Look at the signature: public function index($id, $firstName, $lastName, UploadedFileInterface $logo).

$id will be fetched from the URL (@URL("/user/{id}"))
$firstName and $lastName will be automatically fetched from the GET/POST parameters
finally, $logo will contain the uploaded file from $_FILES['logo']

See the magic? Just by looking at your method signature, you know what parameters your route is expecting. The method signature is self-documenting the route!

Even better, Splash is highly extensible. You can add your own plugins to automatically fill some parameters of the request (we call those ParameterFetchers). You could for instance write a parameter fetcher to automatically load Doctrine entities:

    /**
     * Lo and behold: you can extend Splash to automatically fill the function parameters with objects of your liking
     *
     * @URL("/product/{product}")
     * @Post
     */
    public function index(My\Entities\Product $product)
    {
        return //...;
    }

Best practices

You might wonder: "How will Splash instantiate your controller?" Well, Splash will not instantiate your controller. Instantiating services and containers is the role of the dependency injection container. Splash connects to any container-interop compatible container and will fetch your controllers from the container.

This means that you must declare your controller in the container you are using. This is actually a good thing as this encourages you to not use the container as a service locator.

High performance

For best performance, Splash is caching the list of routes it detects. Unlike what can be seen in most micro-frameworks where the application slows down as the number of routes increases, in Splash, performance stays constant as the number of routes increases.

Found a typo? Something is wrong in this documentation? Just fork and edit it!

Installation

Basics