J. Carlos Roldán

After many years of making backends for one or another project, I find myself I keep frequently writing the same boilerplate code. Even if I tend to reuse my templates, the code ends up diverging enough to make switching between projects take some headspace. In an attempt to solve this, I created oink.php, a single-file PHP framework focused on speed and simplicity when building JSON APIs and web services.

function comment_create() {
    $post_id = id("post_id");
    $author = email("author");
    $text = str("text", min: 5, max: 100);
    check(DB\post_exists($post_id), "postNotFound");
    return ["id" => DB\create_comment($post_id, $author, $text)];
}

That simple function is enough to create an endpoint with route /comment/create that takes three parameters post_id, author and text, validates them, and returns a JSON with the id of the new post. And to run it, you just need to add the oink.php file to your root folder, and point it to the file that defines your endpoints.

This library borrows some ideas I've been using in my personal projects for a while to speed up development. First, the routing is made by mapping API paths to function names, so I skip the step of creating and maintaining a route table. Also, all endpoints are method-agnostic, so it doesn't matter if they are called using GET, POST, DELETE or any other method; the mapping will be correct.

I also merge POST params, JSON data, files, cookies and even headers into a single key-value object that I access through the validation functions. For example, calling str("text", min: 5, max: 100) will look in the request for a "text" parameter, and validate that it is a string between 5 and 100 characters, or send a 400 error otherwise.

These tricks are highly non-standard and create some limitations, but none of them is unsolvable. This attempt of placing dev speed before everything else, including best practices, is what made me think of Oink as a good name for it. The library should feel like a pig in the mud: simple and comfortable, even though it's not the cleanest thing in the world.

Most of Oink's code comes from battle-tested templates I have been using for my personal projects. This blog's server, which also hosts several other applications, manages around 2000 requests per hour. Despite DDOS attempts or sudden increases in traffic, the server's CPU and memory usage rarely exceeds 5%, thanks to the good ol' LAMP stack. While my professional projects often utilize Python, the scalability and maintainability of running multiple PHP projects on a single Apache server showcases the stack's efficiency. It's evident why PHP still ranks the most used backend language in most reports.

To explore oink.php further or contribute to its development, visit the GitHub repository. While I recommend frameworks like Laravel or Symfony for larger enterprise projects needing scalability, Oink offers a compelling alternative for developers prioritizing speed and simplicity.