== Welcome to Akelos

Akelos is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create
database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Control pattern.

This pattern splits the view (also called the presentation) into “dumb” templates
that are primarily responsible for inserting pre-built data in between HTML tags.
The model contains the “smart” domain objects (such as Account, Product, Person,
Post) that holds all the business logic and knows how to persist themselves to
a database. The controller handles the incoming requests (such as Save New Account,
Update Product, Show Post) by manipulating the model and directing data to the view.

In Akelos, the model is handled by what’s called an object-relational mapping
layer entitled Active Record. This layer allows you to present the data from
database rows as objects and embellish these data objects with business logic
methods. You can read more about Active Record in
link:vendor/akelos/active_record/README.markdown

The controller and view are handled by the Action Pack, which handles both
layers by its two parts: Action View and Action Controller. These two layers
are bundled in a single package due to their heavy interdependence. This is
unlike the relationship between the Active Record and Action Pack that is much
more separate. Each of these packages can be used independently outside of
Akelos. You can read more about Action Pack in
link:vendor/akelos/action_pack/README.markdown.

== Getting Started

1. Make sure the ./public is visible to your web server.
2. Point your http://localhost/ and get the welcome screen.
3. Follow the guidelines to start developing your application

== Web Servers

== Debugging Akelos

Sometimes your application goes wrong. Fortunately there are a lot of tools that
will help you debug it and get it back on the akelos.

First area to check is the application log files. Have “tail -f” commands running
on the development.log. Akelos will automatically display debugging and runtime information
to that file. Debugging info will also be shown in the
browser on requests from 127.0.0.1.

You can also log your own messages directly into the log file from your code using
the AkLogger class from inside your controllers. Example:

The result will be a message in your log file along the lines of:

== Console

You can interact with the domain model by starting the console through ./script/console.
Here you’ll have all parts of the application configured, just like it is when the
application is running. You can inspect domain models, change values, and save to the
database.

== Differences from Ruby on Rails.

- On the controller you must access to $this→params, $this→ModelName,
$this→Request, $this→Response, intead of @request ….

- Templates are ended in .tpl and not .erb

- Views work using PHP, and a pseudo-ruby syntax for calling helpers.

- All the methods (but helpers) use PEAR like naming conventions so instead of
AkActionController::url_for() you need to call AkActionController::urlFor()

- Helpers are located at /vendor/akelos/action_pack/helpers (it’s worth having a look
at them)

- In order to expose data from your controllers to the views, you’ll simply
need to assign them as attributes of the controller that is handling the
action so:

Will expose into ./app/views/post/index.tpl $message variable so you can use
it like:

or the same using SinTags

== i18n and l10n the Akelos way

Locale files are located at:

In order to change the language of your application can prefix your request
with the locale name so:

and
http://example.com/en/post/add # will load ./config/locales/en.php

All the functions for writing multilingual code rely on the Ak::t() method.
Based on the Ak::t() function you can find:

All these four will save new locales onto their corresponding namespace in
the example above “./app/locales/post/en.php”

If you want to use your own namespace for storing locales you can do it like:

In this case it will store it at “./app/locales/shared_posts/en.php”

Deal with Compound Messages

As you can see the Framework has been designed with l10n and i18n in mind. One
nice and flexible feature common to all these functions but the sintags one is
the ability to add compounded messages, you might already realized this but
here is a small example:

Ak::t(‘Hello %title %last_name,’,
array(‘%title’=>$title,‘%last_name’=>$last_name,‘%first_name’=>$first_name));

The Sintags way to deal with compounded messages is

Internationalizing Models.

You can have multilingual database columns by adding the locale prefix plus
and underscore to the column name. This way when you do

you’ll get the information on the “en_title” column if “en” is your current
locale.

The same way you can set posted attributes like

and the attributes will be mapped to their corresponding columns.

In order to make this work you need to add to your config/config.php

In order to convert between charsets you can use Ak::recode() and
Ak::utf8(‘My ISO Text’, ‘ISO-8859-1’).

== Description of Contents

app
Holds all the code that’s specific to this particular application.

app/controllers
Holds controllers that should be named like weblogs_controller.php for
automated URL mapping. All controllers should descend from ApplicationController
which itself descends from AkActionController.

app/models
Holds models that should be named like post.php.
Most models will descend from ActiveRecord.

app/views
Holds the template files for the view that should be named like
weblogs/index.html.tpl for the WeblogsController#index action. All views use eRuby
syntax.

app/views/layouts
Holds the template files for layouts to be used with views. This models the common
header/footer method of wrapping views. In your controllers, define a layout using the
$layout = ‘default’ and create a file named default.html.tpl. Inside default.html.tpl,
call {content_for_layout} to render the view using this layout.

app/helpers
Holds view helpers that should be named like weblogs_helper.php. These are generated
for you automatically when using script/generate for controllers. Helpers can be used to
wrap functionality for your views into methods.

app/installers
Holds the migration files for creating the database schema and other actions that require
version control.

app/locales
Holds the text translations for multilingual apps.

config
Configuration files for the Akelos environment, the routing map, the database, and other dependencies.

doc
This directory is where your application documentation will be stored when generated
using rake doc:app

lib
Application specific libraries. Basically, any kind of custom code that doesn’t
belong under controllers, models, or helpers. This directory is in the load path.

public
The directory available for the web server. Contains subdirectories for images, stylesheets,
and javascripts. Also contains the dispatchers and the default HTML files. This should be
set as the DOCUMENT_ROOT of your web server.

makelos
Rake for PHP. Use it for automation. run ./makelos to see available options.

script
Helper scripts for automation and generation.

test
Unit and functional tests along with fixtures. When using ./makelos generate scripts, template
test files will be generated for you and placed in this directory.

vendor
External libraries that the application depends on. Includes the plugins subdirectory and is the
default location for the Akelos Framework.