Application Building With Horde

Jan Schneider

The Horde Project

I thought Horde was just ...

• Webmail?
• Groupware?
• A blue design with a sidebar?

Different kinds of Horde Applications

"What is Horde?"

• The Horde Project: an open source project driven by:
• The Horde Developers: volunteer developers providing:
• The Horde Application Framework: a PHP web application framework, consisting of:
• The Horde Libraries: PEAR-style packages powering:
• The Horde Applications: real-world integrated web applications

Why: Libraries

• Over 60 high quality PHP libraries in PEAR packages
• PHP4 and PHP5
• Authentication and Permissions to MIME handling to user preferences to XML transformations
• Coding standards that were the basis for the PEAR coding standards
• Initial PEAR packages including Log and Mail were contributed from Horde to PEAR

Why: Standards

• XHTML/CSS Layout
• Comprehensive MIME standards support
• Groupware apps all handle iCalendar, vCard and iTip
• SOAP, XML-RPC, and JSON-RPC access to all application APIs
• SyncML server
• WebDAV server

Why: Backend Independence

• SQL drivers work for MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MSSQL, more
• LDAP support for contacts, preferences, users, more.
• VFS (virtual filesystem) support for local files, SQL, FTP, more
• Pluggable drivers for all backends

Why: Applications

• Over 50 in CVS
• Used by MIT, Portugal Telecom, and many many more
• Groupware apps are all in at least 2nd major release
• All applications integrate users and their data
• Developer tools including Chora and Whups
• Access to APIs without tight coupling

Why: Internationalization

• Full Unicode support in IMP and most apps
• Standards-compliant character set handling
• 39 different translations

Why: The Project

• Incredibly feature-rich
• Built through more than ten years of development ...
• ... of real-world production web applications
• Constantly updated, improved, innovated, and refactored

Application Building

All of these applications, APIs, libraries, etc. are why you can build any kind of application or site with Horde.

What makes a Horde application?

Typically Horde applications share a common structure and code organization. The skeleton application provides this for you.

What makes..., cont.

But all you really need is:

• An entry in horde/config/registry.php

That's all?

Technically, yes. But to take full advantage of Horde, you'll also want:

• A config/ directory with at least conf.xml and prefs.php files
• A lib/api.php file describing your app's API
• A locale/ directory for translations
• A themes/ directory for styles and graphics

registry.php

Here's an application's registry.php entry:

Building CRUD applications

• Rdo: lightweight ORM with PDO-based and native drivers
• Automatic generation of Model classes
• Override with customized Model
• Automatic generation of Horde_Forms from Model

Introduction to Rdo

• ORM - Object-Relational Mapping
• Uses PDO drivers
• Use of PHP 5 interfaces - Iterator, IteratorAggregate, ArrayAccess, Countable, etc.

Rdo Example Usage

Rdo: Creating & Editing

Rdo: More Find & Delete

Form Generation

Introduction to Horde_Form

• Over 40 validating field types
• Can be created programmatically or automatically from Horde_Form_Helper
• Full server-side validation
• Javascript helpers for many tasks (date picker, color picker, et. al.)

More coming with Horde 4

• Horde_Routes: Port of Python Routes, mapping of URLs to code (controllers)
• Horde_View: Lightweight templating solution, using PHP as the template engine, extendable through helpers
• Horde_Controller: Complete MVC controller solution for Horde 4 applications
• Horde_Date_Parser: Parses natural language into dates and spans
• Oauth, Yaml, Cli, Argv, Webservices (Facebook, S3, Scribd, Twitter, Vimeo), and more

Questions?

Resources

• The Horde website: http://www.horde.org/
• Developer Documentation: http://dev.horde.org/
• Wiki Developer Documentation: http://wiki.horde.org/Doc/Dev
• Mailing lists: http://www.horde.org/mail/