Piko Framework overview

Sylvain PHILIP — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 08:43:49 +0000

Today I would like to make a presentation on the Piko, a new one in the PHP frameworks landscape.

Piko is a lightweight, fast and flexible PHP micro framework. It is easy to learn and use, and probably making it a great choice for web development.

Genesis

I'm the author of Piko and the project started in 2019. My primary idea was to embed a micro-framework library with a small footprint in a distributed application and working like Yii2 framework but keeping only the essential to build a Web application.

With this idea in mind, I decided to write the library and given its name "Piko", an assembly of "Pico" and "Peak" in one word. "Pico" for lightness and "Peak" for precision.

Features

In the actual state, Piko comes with:

A middleware interface
A blazing fast router
A modular MVC routing
A simple rendering engine (using PHP templates)
An event handler
A model helper

Additional features (in separate packages):

A i18n component
An Active Record component
A user session component

Each of these components has been well tested.

Moreover, Piko is compliant with good practices and PHP standards. It works well with third-party libraries that follow these standards too.

Demo

To have a look on a basic application made with Piko, you can scaffold a project on the command line using composer:

composer create-project piko/project yourproject

Then you can launch the project using the built-in PHP web server:

cd yourproject
php -S localhost:8080 -t web

Real use cases

These websites were built with Piko:

More info

Piko router, a lightweight and blazing fast router for PHP

Sylvain PHILIP — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 12:02:04 +0000

I recently wrote a new PHP router (Piko router) that stick out from the others by its implementation.

Unlike popular PHP routers, Piko router doesn't solve the problem of route matching using regular expressions. Instead of that, it uses a radix trie structure to store routes definitions and a search algorithm to retrieve them against a given path. This approach is very efficient because the search consist just to traverse a prefix tree.

I found libraries in other programming languages that use this approach : matchit (Rust), find-my-way (Javascript), fasthttp (Go) But, curiously, no one in PHP. That's why I decided to bring my contribution to have the same approach in PHP.

To demonstrate this search efficiency, I wrote some benchmark tests to compare Piko router against Fastroute and Symfony Router which are references in their domain.

Piko router was initially designed to be used in the Piko framework (another project I made) but it can be embedded as a standalone dependency in third party application via composer.