Class structures & templates (was Re: [Phpgroupware-developers] Filename Standards?)

[Brent Kelly]

Chris Weiss wrote:

> Core apps tend to stick to the "ideal" standards, but for an app that's "just 
> for
> you" you can do whatever works.  Having that flexability is nice sometimes.  
> For a
> simple example check out the Notes app.
>
> The basic idea is to have a 3-layered structure, Storage (so), Backoffice (bo), 
> and
> User Interface (ui).  Basically, the web based apps will call the UI functions, 
> and
> then UI will call the BO, which will then call the SO.  The SO will retrieve the
> requested data and hand it back to the BO, which will do any processing needed 
> such
> as turning serialized data in to arrays and other such things then pass that 
> back
> to the UI class.  The UI then only does formating and makes use of the 
> templates to
> send the formated data to the browser.
>
> Why split it up?  Well, you can now have your app provide a XML-RPC interface 
> that
> bypasses the UI layer and makes the BO call and hands that data back to the 
> XML-RPC
> client, and maybe another method that simply accesses the SO call and returns 
> the
> raw data if your "thick client" app is more suited to do the BO type processing.
> Or even make another UI class that makes full use of the same functions as the 
> main
> UI class except maybe provides a WAP interface instead of HTML. this way logic 
> is
> seperated from interface and storage.
>  

With regard to these 'bo', 'so' and 'ui' classes, is it just me or does 
this seem a step in the opposite direction as far as the whole 
'template' system goes?  I may be completey wrong & what I talk about 
below may already exist - but if it does, I can't seem to figure it out ;).

I've been developing a custom template for phpgroupware and have found 
that for apps such as calander that use this system, adding/modifying 
templates can require extensive modification to the ui classes stored in 
the /inc directory of the application. Would it not make more sense to 
have these class files stored in the template directory of the app, or 
at least allow developers to have their own custom ui classes in their 
template directory of the application which, if a custom file exists, it 
would override its respective file in the inc directory? This would 
allow templates to be developed without requiring modifications to the 
initial code, allowing the same flexible template structure that existed 
with the old system.

Thanks in advance for anyone that can shed some light :)

Brent Kelly,
Zeald Ltd.