The out-of-the-box framework (part2)

(Part 1: https://medium.com/@romaninsh/agile-toolkit-20-years-for-a-perfect-crud-b7efb0b495a4)

Building an app with PHP is a craft. Most developers I know have been investing lots and lots of time into learning wide range of technologies:

need a simple app? few years to learn!

So for anyone new there is a HUGE PRICE to pay (in terms of time) to get into web development profession. Most of experienced developers are actually quite comfortable with this — less competition.

Well, this does not seem right to me! Companies race in order to make products “simpler” and “intuitive” yet we have this situation that’s absolutely merciless for beginners in Web Development industry.

My work on Agile Toolkit is to address this issue.

I don’t want to compliment the complexity of PHP universe with yet another layer. I want to create a path for anyone to start building Front-end or Back-end without much learning.

I also thought to share my work for free and make it possible for others to contribute easily.

Do not get me wrong. Knowing technologies are good and makes you a much better developer, but if your goal is to build a simple app for your company, you shouldn’t be forced to spend months of your time to build something like this:

Built this with PHP code only in under an hour

So if you are still learning — this should come as a good news to you. There is a way, you simply have to follow a right path:

I am passionate about clearly marking this path, and in my next article I’d like to talk about some first steps. The rest of this article I’ll just list all the things which you can “leave for later” as well as my reasoning why.

HTML is now rarely written by developers — frontend or backend. Most of it comes as pre-made chunks from CSS frameworks anyways. CSS knowledge is also not needed for basic apps, as you get a lot of out-of-the-box components for all your possible needs. JavaScript and jQuery are part of working components. The next example does rely on JavaScript and jQuery, but luckily you don’t have to know them to use them in Agile Toolkit:

Few more notes. Agile Toolkit apps are responsive, meaning they look fine on desktop and mobile. There is Semantic UI and Less as well as a bit of npm and webpack under the hood.

We created a downloadable ZIP distribution on www.agiletoolkit.org. If you prefre composer — it’s bundled and supported. Use it when you are ready. PHPunit and PSRs are strictly followed in Agile Toolkit code and its documentation. ZIP file also comes with a .git folder making it super-easy to use ‘Github Desktop’ app.

Next block on the diagram — “WebServer technologies” are looking especially scary. Great news — most web developers no longer play part-time UNIX admins. Your laptop will only need “php”, which is pre-installed on a Mac, and can be installed easily on Linux or Windows. I will show you how to deploy your app using Heroku which is very user-friendly and relies on technoolgies such as Docker and Nginx under the hood.

For the RESTful APIs and Authentication you will be using Agile API and some extensions. We thought it’s best if our development patterns would be secure by default — less chance for you to make a mistake. I’ll talk about that in the future articles.

You will be needing to store the data, but don’t worry. Agile Data makes interaction with Relation Databases much simpler. In my follow-up articles I’ll tell you which tools are good, simple and free. You don’t need to know SQL either, because we will be using persistence abstraction.

So the outlook for those who wants results and fast is quite promising. In my next article, I’ll show you how to make the first step.