This week, I’ve been prepping for a talk on Quercus in which I promised to show a demo of Spring MVC using a PHP view. So that means that I actually had to do it.
Turns out it was quite easy and PHP makes for a very nice, compact view technology for Spring MVC. This is a bit of tease since the code for this won’t go out until at least next week, but since a number of people have been asking for this a while, I thought I’d give a preview…
First, let me show how it looks by using the sample “ImageDB” application that ships with Spring. Here’s a screenshot of the app in action:
Basically, you upload an image to the page and it keeps track of what you’ve uploaded in a database. Here are the JSP and PHP views side-by-side:
What I think is interesting between these two is that the PHP, even though it’s calling Java objects, has a simpler syntax. It’s not a major issue, but you can see that PHP is as reasonable as any other view for Java.
Now how do you configure it? Just add the QuercusView class to a UrlBasedViewResolver and give a php suffix and you’re done:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!–
- DispatcherServlet application context for the image database.
–>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-2.5.xsd">
<!– Activates @Autowired for ImageController –>
<context:annotation-config/>
<!– MultiActionController that defines user interface actions as separate methods –>
<bean id="imageController" class="org.springframework.samples.imagedb.web.ImageController"/>
<!– MultipartResolver for parsing file uploads, implementation for Commons FileUpload –>
<bean id="multipartResolver" class="org.springframework.web.multipart.commons.CommonsMultipartResolver"/>
<bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.UrlBasedViewResolver">
<property name="viewClass" value="com.caucho.spring.quercus.QuercusView"/>
<property name="prefix" value="/WEB-INF/views/"/>
<property name="suffix" value=".php"/>
</bean>
</beans>
If you’re interested in the implementation… The view was pretty easy to connect up once I learned Spring’s view API. It’s essentially a Servlet.service() call with a map of model values. So the QuercusView class above is just a modified QuercusServlet that injects the model values as PHP globals. I’m not sure that that’s right just yet, but it’s a start. The other option would be to put the values as PHP superglobals or in a specialized Spring array.