About Gacela

Gacela helps you to build modular applications

Splitting your project into different modules help in terms of maintainability and scalability.

It encourages your modules to interact with each other in a unified way by following these rules:

  • Modules interact with each other only via their Facade
  • The Facade is the entry point of a module
  • The Factory manage the intra-dependencies the module
  • The DependencyProvider resolves the extra-dependencies of the module
  • The Config has access to the project's config files

Module structure

application-name
├── gacela.php
├── config
│   └── ...
│
├── src
│   ├── ModuleA
│   │   ├── Domain
│   │   │   └── ...
│   │   ├── Application
│   │   │   └── ...
│   │   ├── Infrastructure
│   │   │   └── ...
│   │   │ # These are the 4 "gacela classes":
│   │   ├── Facade.php
│   │   ├── Factory.php
│   │   ├── DependencyProvider.php
│   │   └── Config.php
│   │
│   └── ModuleB
│       └── ...
│
├── tests
│   └── ...
└── vendor
    └── ...

Gacela uses the Facade and Factory patterns

Facade

The responsibility of the Facade is to provide a simplified interface to hide the domain implementation. It will simply give you the methods with the possible actions this module can do.

In Gacela, the Facade is the entry point of your module.

Factory

The Factory's responsibility is to orchestrate the different classes and it's dependencies (through Dependency Provider or Config).

The Factory class creates the classes of your logic and its dependencies. They are provided to the Facade. It's a layer between the user and your domain.

It resolves the intra-dependencies of your module's classes.

Dependency Provider

The communication between different modules it's done via their Facades because they are the entry point of a module. The main difference between Factories and Dependency Providers is that Factories are responsible for in-module dependencies, while Dependency Providers are responsible for module-to-module dependencies.

It resolves the extra-dependencies of your module.

Config

This concept is not a design pattern itself, but it's designed in a way that you can easily access all config values in your modules, and it's accessible from the Factory out of the box. The Config allows you to construct your business objects with specific configuration values clearly and straightforwardly.

It has access to the key-values from your config files.