Work on CakePHP 2.0 is moving along, and I wanted to take some time to discuss and explain one of the sizeable refactorings that has been done for 2.0. In previous versions request parameters were just a bunch of arrays that were copied to the various places they were needed in the framework.

Since PHP lacks a decimal type, it only has floats and integers. Arbitrary precision floating points are reasonable once you stop expecting them to be precise. I’ve learned to deal with PHP’s floats, and arbitrary precision floats in general. However, floats behaving totally different based on the current locale, was something I didn’t expect.

I’ve been playing around with Twig in the last few weeks. I was in need of a template parser and wanted to avoid Smarty as I’ve had unpleasant experiences with it in the past, which lead me to Twig.

Over the weekend I put some time into my AssetCompress plugin. A few remaining issues were fixed and a few new features have been added since the previous release.

As you may or may not know CakePHP is transitioning to PHPUnit and with this transition comes a totally new Mock object interface/implementation.

In the past I’ve used a variety of tools to deploy client sites, most often using version control. However, for my blog I’ve always used FTP. Its a pretty old-school approach, and something that I’ve been lacking the time to correct. Last weekend I finally took the plunge and figured out how to get Capistrano to deploy my site.

In the recent bakery article concerning the ongoing development of CakePHP 2.0. The already underway migration from SimpleTest to PHPUnit was introduced. I wanted to go into some of the reasons and motivations for that decision as well as explain some of the long term benefits.

Normally when people think of the App class, they think of a file loader. However, App is also able to introspect your application and provide information about the resources it contains.