no-framework-tutorial/6-dispatching-to-a-class.md

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Dispatching to a Class

In this tutorial we won't implement MVC (Model-View-Controller). MVC can't be implemented properly in PHP anyway, at least not in the way it was originally conceived. If you want to learn more about this, read A Beginner's Guide To MVC and the followup posts.

So forget about MVC and instead let's worry about separation of concerns.

We will need a descriptive name for the classes that handle the requests. For this tutorial I will use Controllers because that will be familiar for the people coming from a framework background. You could also name them Handlers.

Create a new folder inside the src/ folder with the name Controllers.In this folder we will place all our controller classes. In there, create a Homepage.php file.

<?php

namespace Example\Controllers;

class Homepage
{
    public function show()
    {
        echo 'Hello World';
    }
}

The autoloader will only work if the namespace of a class matches the file path and the file name equals the class name. At the beginning I defined Example as the root namespace of the application so this is referring to the src/ folder.

Now let's change the hello world route so that it calls your new class method instead of the closure. Change your Routes.php to this:

return [
    ['GET', '/', ['Example\Controllers\Homepage', 'show']],
];

Instead of just a callable you are now passing an array. The first value is the fully namespaced classname, the second one the method name that you want to call.

To make this work, you will also have to do a small refactor to the routing part of the Bootstrap.php:

case \FastRoute\Dispatcher::FOUND:
    $className = $routeInfo[1][0];
    $method = $routeInfo[1][1];
    $vars = $routeInfo[2];
    
    $class = new $className;
    $class->$method($vars);
    break;

So instead of just calling a method you are now instantiating an object and then calling the method on it.

Now if you visit http://localhost:8000/ everything should work. If not, go back and debug. And of course don't forget to commit your changes.

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