Tiny PHP Framework

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Core Concepts

The conceptual tour of the framework. Read these in order if you’re new to Tiny.

Architecture

  1. MVC architecture — how Tiny implements Model-View-Controller, and the request lifecycle.

Request handling

  1. Routing — the filesystem-based router, 3-segment URL resolution, and the fallback algorithm.
  2. Controllers — TinyController, HTTP-verb dispatch, request/response helpers.
  3. Request & Response — the full TinyRequest / TinyResponse API reference.
  4. Middleware — pre-controller hooks (auth, CORS, logging, rate limiting).

Views

  1. Views — templates, components, layouts, asset helpers.
  2. HTMX & React — built-in HTMX awareness and React SSR/SPA rendering via tiny::renderReact().

Data

  1. Models — TinyModel, schema validation, caching patterns.
  2. Database — raw-SQL helpers for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite.

Testing

  1. Testing — built-in zero-ceremony test harness, tiny::swap(), tiny::test(), TinyTestResponse, :memory: SQLite.

See also