Skip to main content

Aura Framework v2: The Missing Manual

·543 words·3 mins
Hari KT
Author
Hari KT
Freelancer | Founder of Tripti and Tanvish | Maintainer of Aura for PHP, created by Paul M Jones
Table of Contents

Aura has an awesome collection of libraries for different purpose.

It has components for authentication, cli, request and response, router, dependency injection container, dispatcher, html, view, event handlers, validation, extended pdo, query builders, sql schema, marshal, build and modify uri, http, internationalization, session, forms, includer.

If you are new to aura, there is probably something you may want to figure out yourself.

Some of the components have version 1 and version 2 releases. There is a question of which branch corresponds to which version.

The v1 packages are in develop branch and v2 over develop-2 branch.

There are a few changes in v1 to v2. It is easy to understand when you look into the composer.json or if you know aura v2 follows psr-4 directory structure than the v1 that followed psr-0.

If you see a package "aura/installer-default": "1.0.0" in the require of composer.json it is for sure v1.

Composer installs every package in the vendor folder. The name of the package installed will be the package name. So basically it installs vendor/aura/<package-name> .

In aura framework v1 we have some specific folder structure and it was before composer becomes a standard. So when composer became a standard we added a way to install the framework specific installations in package folder and the rest of the library installation (other than aura framework) in the same way as composer did.

So was the existence of aura/installer-default in v1 package. In v2 we moved to composer assisted two stage configuration.

v2 Framework
#

There exists a micro framework/full stack framework for v2. But things are hard to find when you are new to aura and when github organization have more than 30 repositories.

[Aura framework]((https://github.com/auraphp/Aura.Framework_Project) is built on top of aura libraries, and the library docs applies to the framework also. But people new to aura may be having hard time to find the specific documentation or may be stuck sometime. I don’t know whether my thoughts are right or wrong.

Documentation is one of the hardest problem when newer versions are released. Say 1.0.0 released, 1.1.0 … although the documentation is there in the installed repo, it is probably hard to make things online.

I was talking with Paul M Jones regarding the documentation lately, and he too shared some concerns. Talking with him gave me some inspiration to start the missing manual for the aura framework.

Goal
#

  • let people read and learn
  • promote aura with good documentation
  • at the sametime, to make a living

Yes, I am independent freelance php developer. It was a sad story that I don’t want to recall how I became a freelancer by chance.

Before my freelancing, I was down for a few months, not physically but mentally which has impacted my life with some ups and downs. But now I really love working as an independent contractor.

About the book
#

You can find the book over github licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

The book is available free to read online. If you find a typo, or feel something can be improved open an issue or send a pull request .

If you find it interesting you should consider buying a copy from leanpub to show your support to the project.

Thank you.

Related

Aura Framework Released

·67 words·1 min
It is a great feeling, and one of the happiest moment in my life when aura releases its stable framework. Aura is one of my first framework, which helped me to learn the inner working of a framework, how to create a framework, rather than playing with full stack framework. If you are interested to learn or contribute in the next version of Aura join the group.

Aura Framework Releases Beta 4

·41 words·1 min
Aura.Framework released Beta4. In this release Aura.Framework has extracted the Hello Word package and renamed it as Aura.Demo. You can get the system as a whole from http://auraphp.github.com/system/downloads/ Read about the release from blog post and join discussion at auraphp group

Extending Plates With Aura.Html Helpers

·730 words·4 mins
Aura.Html provides HTML escapers and helpers, including form input helpers, that can be used in any template, view, or presentation system. In this post I would like to give you a short introduction to Aura.Html and how you could use with Plates a native php templating system like Aura.View. Aura.Html was extracted from Aura.View helper functions of version 1, when we at aura noticed that people who uses Aura.Input may need some html helper functions and they may not be using a templating like Aura.View, but some other templating system.