NYCPHP Meetup

[Jim Hendricks]

As a fairly new PHP developer, I'm wrestling with not only learning the
lingo, but also attempting to discover best practice.  When I was first
faced with ASP when ASP was first introduced I made the design snafu of
developing my first small page as a single page.  Login, login validation,
form entry, form validation and submission, and submission response all
rolled up into 1 .asp file.  While it was great for this 1 small app ( more
of an applet ), when the client wanted to add more stuff it required
re-arranging the app splitting it up, figuring out the then flawed
response.redirect etc.  It then required adding to the top of each page the
security checks to ensure the user was logged in etc. ( of course added as
an include ).

Well to make a short story long, I encountered an ASP app written by another
programmer which I was inheriting which used a single entry point(
everything went through default.asp ( ASP's equivalent of index.php ) ).  He
used an encrypted querystring parameter to key the ASP file as to which page
was really required & then using a case statement included the necessary
files.  He must not have been aware of ASP's static include, all includes
are included regardless of control logic around the include.  I did think
the solution to be rather elegant, hiding the implementation from the user
by only exposing 1 page.  Later as I developed it I even moved the encrypted
parameter to a hidden form field to even hide that part of the
implementation.

I've seen a few PHP apps floating around that use a similar design.  In PHP
the obvious advantage over the ASP version is the dynamic include ( include
based on the surounding logic ).  I'm interested to get the opinion of more
experienced PHP developers on this single entry point design.  I realize
this design will not allow search engines to index more than the entry
point, but I'm developing in an extranet environment where search engines
are not desired anyway.

I think one of the things that draws me to this solution is the ease of
security checks and forcing a specific modality ( ie. stopping the browsers
back button & ensuring a specific work flow where required ).

Please let me know your opinion on this.

Jim

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Jim Hendricks, President, Biz Computing, Inc
Phone:  (201) 599-9380     Email: jim at bizcomputinginc.com
Web: www.bizcomputinginc.com
Snail:  Jim Hendricks,  Biz Computing, Inc.,  255 McKinley Ave, New Milford,
NJ 07646
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