On the PHP in Action blog this new post talks about something that's at the core of the front controller for most frameworks - a call to a user function based on the passed in action.

The core of your average web framework is a Front Controller. Front Controllers are commonly considered complex and esoteric. That's a myth. I sometimes brag that I can construct a Front Controller in 15 minutes. Actually, it's doesn't take quite that long. In PHP, a Front Controller can be simplified to just one line of code.

This one line of code, while a very dangerous thing to actually use in an application, illustrates what a front controller does to forward out the request to the rest of the framework. He revises it with a Zend Framework-ish example that splits the request out into a controller/action method.

One-liners can sometimes be quite helpful in your programming, and in hopes it will help someone out there out, Adam Trachtenberg shares one of his own in his latest blog entry today.

A long time ago, I wrote a two line hack that let you use Google as a command line calculator. It eventually ended up in the 2nd and 3rd editions of Google Hacks.

The code calls the Google Calculator page and pulls back in the contents, allowing you to pass in any sort of calulation you might want and pass back out the result all cleaned up and parsed out.