In a post to his site Paul Jones shows how an implementation of his proposed Action-Domain-Responder pattern might look when implemented with Slim, a popular PHP microframework.

I’ve had a warm place in my heart for Slim for a long time, and especially so since recognizing the Action-Domain-Responder pattern. In this post, I’ll show how to refactor the Slim tutorial application to ADR.

One nice thing about Slim (and most other HTTP user interface frameworks) is that they are already “action” oriented. That is, their routers do not presume a controller class with many action methods. Instead, they presume an action closure or a single-action invokable class. So the Action part of Action-Domain-Responder already exists for Slim. All that is needed is to pull extraneous bits out of the Actions, to more clearly separate their behaviors from Domain and the Responder behaviors.

He then works through each piece of the example application, first extracting out the Domain logic then building a Responder to handle the user interface functionality. He combines them to replace the current functionality, pointing out that the responder can now be tested separately from the user interface (templating system).

Now, for a simple case like this, using ADR (or even webbishy MVC) might seem like overkill. But simple cases become complex quickly, and this simple case shows how the ADR separation-of-concerns can be applied as a Slim-based application increases in complexity.