Question

I realize this is a very generic question, but I guess I’m not really looking for a definitive answer. Being new to PHP frameworks I’m having a hard time getting my head around it.

Javascript frameworks, especially with UI extensions, seem to have their sort-of MVC-like approach by separating your JS code from your design. It just seems like it would get confusing to use an additional MVC framework on the backend.

Is this commonly done for primarily AJAX-driven applications? Is there an accepted/common way of doing it?

Answer 1

A quick example of how it can fit together for a Zend Framework app (and this is from a demo app I wrote a few months ago):

• Use the MCV Framework to build a fully functional site (which works without javascript).
• Modify the controller to understand the difference between a ‘normal’ request and an AJAX request (Zend’s context switching makes this easy).
• Add Javascript (in my example jQuery) to cleanly replace the links with AJAX events.

In the end, the PHP app knows that an AJAX request needs an AJAX response (less bandwidth, less processing, only JSON or HTML ‘snippet’), but a normal request needs an entire page generated.

Basically, you’re just using AJAX to request (or update, or add data to) the ‘view’ template, without having to process the entire layout. The Zend Framework Context Switch Action Helper may help this make more sense.

It’s worth mentioning that context switching works well in making a request available in different formats – HTML/XML,CSV,etc.