Recommendation...Modular Extensions or Matchbox?

[eluser]esra[/eluser]
Here is the original article announcing HMVC posted by the authors in JavaWorld magazine.

HMVC: The layered pattern for developing strong client tiers

In reading this article, keep in mind that HMVC was originally designed for Java. Ignore the Java code and focus on the illustrations explaining the architectural structure of an HMVC application and read the text. The GUI Frame terminology could be compared to a PHP template. A GUI Pane could be compared to a MVC triad.

There is reader letter elsewhere on JavaWorld based on a comment about the similarity of HMVC to PAC (the Presentation-Abstraction-Control architectural pattern which is described in detail in the POSA book) along with a reply by one of the authors with an explanation of the differences. I just tried to find it, but could not. Maybe someone else will have better luck.

There is one implementation of an HMVC framework for PHP called Claw by Tomas Varaneckas. The Claw project was abandoned but the code is available on both Tigris.org and phpclasses.org. There are two versions available on the web--the 3.x.x stable version and the 4.x.x svn version. Claw is PHP5 only and licensed as GPL. The latter version is stable, but the PHP Renderer needs some work. The Smarty Renderer works nicely. If you want to experiment with HMVC as a means of porting more ideas over to CI, this is a good solution to play with. If you have an interest in PHP5 coding examples on the framework level, the use of abstract classes and interfaces in Claw should present some interesting ideas for code abstraction. Claw also uses its own approach to namespaces and Claw applications can be loaded by PHP desktop applications. Overall, there are a lot of good ideas in the code.