Phalcon Cookbook

Master Phalcon by implementing hands-on recipes using industry best practices with the Web and CLI interfaces

About This Book

• Create quick prototypes with the Phalcon Developer Tools
• Learn to use the powerful and uniquely efficient Phalcon ORM
• Reuse codes in real projects

Who This Book Is For

If you are a beginner-to-intermediate Phalcon developer who wants to level up or an advanced user who is seeking some new techniques and insight, then this book is perfect for you. This book will be relevant to you over a long period of time due to the mixed nature of this book in providing both abstract comprehension as well as specific examples meant to be usable in your projects. You will be able to experiment with each new aspect of integration in prebuilt recipes meant to best illustrate each specific feature. This will save you lots of time getting up to speed before attempting to integrate into a real application.

What You Will Learn

• Install the Phalcon extension from both premade packages and source code
• Create a normal and micro application structure
• Understand the dispatcher event cycle and create custom plugins
• Get hands-on using the Phalcon Query Language and ORM
• Create flexible views with the Volt template system
• Leverage Phalcon to prevent common security vulnerabilities
• Optimize an application with focused solutions
• Profile and debug an application to get increased reliability

In Detail

Phalcon is a high-performance PHP framework delivered as a PHP extension. This provides new opportunities for speed and application design, which until recently have been unrealized in the PHP ecosystem.

Packed with simple learning exercises, technology prototypes, and real-world usable code, this book will guide you from the beginner and setup stage all the way to advanced usage. You will learn how to avoid niche pitfalls, how to use the command-line developer tools, how to integrate with new web standards, as well as how to set up and customize the MVC application structure.

You will see how Phalcon can be used to quickly set up a single file web application as well as a complex multi-module application suitable for long-term projects. Some of the recipes focus on abstract concepts that are vital to get a deep comprehension of Phalcon and others are designed as a vehicle to deliver real-world usable classes and code snippets to solve advanced problems. You’ll start out with basic setup and application structure and then move onto the Phalcon MVC and routing implementation, the power of the ORM and Phalcon Query Language, and Phalcon’s own Volt templating system. Finally, you will move on to caching, security, and optimization.

Style and approach

An easy-to-start guide that provides