Writing
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Looking backwards and forwards
Jan 01 2009
Well another year has begun, and often this is the time that people mull over the past and make plans for the future. Well this post will be no different.
Looking to the past
Personally, my wife and I decided that it was high time we abandon the renter’s life and make a concerted effort to tighten the belts and try to purchase a place. We did so in september, and I’ve never been happier.
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CakePHP RC4 released
Dec 19 2008
Earlier this evening the last 300 changes to CakePHP were merged into the trunk forming CakePHP RC4. It should be a painless update for all, and it brings us one step closer to a final stable release of 1.2, something we all look forward to.
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Testing CakePHP Controllers the hard way
Dec 18 2008
By now you already know or should know about
CakeTestCase::testAction()and the wondrous things it can do. However,testActionhas a few shortcomings. It can’t handle redirects, it doesn’t let you use the power of Mocks, and its impossible to make assertions on object state changes. Sometimes you need to do things the hard way, stick your fingers in the mud and work it out. -
DebugKit updates
Dec 13 2008
I’ve been working hard over the last few weeks to improve the DebugKit and have added what I think are some pretty cool features. First up is
FireCake.FireCakeis a fully functional FirePHP library built specifically with CakePHP in mind. -
Free slides - CakeFest Argentina
Dec 10 2008
I’ve uploaded the slides from the talks I gave at CakeFest Argentina. Both unit test talks are one file, as that is how it was originally written. You can find them in my Downloads area. Hope you enjoy.
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CakeFest Argentina after thoughts.
Dec 07 2008
Well I’m finally back in Canada after a somewhat hairy experience at JFK airport in New York, I’m home in the great white north. I had an awesome time at CakeFest and would like to thank all the sponsors and all the people who came out. It was a really great experience for me, and a pleasure to finally be able to put faces to the names and lines of text/code speak to / read each day.
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CakeFest argentina approaches
Nov 28 2008
Cakefest 2 Argentina is quickly approaching. If you are sitting on the fence on going until the last minute then get off and come on down. Its going to be a good time with lots of great talks. I’ll even be there! I’m giving two talks one on Unit Testing and the other on plugin development. Hope to see you there.
To find out more about Cakefest follow the link.
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Making Testable Static classes
Nov 21 2008
If you’ve ever tried to subclass a PHP4 static class you may have come to same conclusion that I have its a total pain in the neck. However, I think I’ve come up with a not too terrible approach.
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Using bindModel to get to deep relations
Nov 14 2008
Often times you will need to query a distant table based on a condition on a close table. For example we have a store that has a table structure like the following:
Now we want to find the Division that a particular Item belongs to. In normal SQL we could do
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New home, new sideproject
Nov 04 2008
I’ve had quite the busy last little month or two. My wife and I have been house shopping for a while, and found a place about 2 months ago. However, just last weekend we moved into our new (to us at least) condo in west Toronto.
The new sideproject is the CakePHP DebugKit . I’ve been hard at work building a ‘debug toolbar’ for CakePHP.
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Using bitmasks to indicate status
Oct 25 2008
At some point or another we’ve all had to make a data model that involved various flags to indicate different statuses / modes for an object. Often the schema for such a data model may end up looking like
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AclExtras Shell
Oct 18 2008
With the help of Oscar Carlsson I’ve updated the AcoSync Shell and renamed it to the AclExtrasShell. With Oscar’s help we’ve added quick and easy ways to recover and verify your tree structures. AclExtras Shell also incorporates all the existing functionality of AcoSync Shell.
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Getting a new Oven, Migrating from CakePHP 1.1 to 1.2
Oct 11 2008
So 1.2 is nearly complete, the code is frozen and there are only a few bugs left to squash before the final release is ready. So you want to upgrade your application from 1.1 to 1.2. Although the 1.2 moniker suggests a ‘minor’ version, a lot has changed under the hood and entire API’s have been rebuilt.
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Code Completion for CakePHP in Eclipse
Oct 04 2008
Eclipse is widely popular, robust and powerful IDE. It supports PHP through the PDT project . PDT gives you some good PHP related development tools, including code completion & code templates to help you save some time.
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CakePHP RC3 released and CakePHP 1.1 new release
Oct 02 2008
If you are following the development of CakePHP today is a good day for you. RC3 was released today! We have all been working really hard to make this Release Candidate better than the last one. There have been over 400 commits since the last RC2. Some of the big changes are related to performance. Larry Masters and the rest of the team have been hard at work making CakePHP snappier and all around speedier.
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Book Review: CakePHP Application Development
Sep 28 2008
The folks at Packt Publishing were kind enough to send me a copy of their newly published book CakePHP Application Development to review. The book is authored by Ahsanul Bari and Anupom Syam, and is a quick read at 300 pages.
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Providing Contextual Form Help with Mootools
Sep 25 2008
I like many webdevelopers build a lot of forms. Forms are the bread and butter of web applications, and while making forms is getting easier for developers, users often still have a hard time with them. In these circumstances it is necessary to give them a help above and beyond ‘password’.
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Creating gracefully degrading javascript and enabling progressive enhancement
Sep 21 2008
Creating gracefully degrading Javascript and CSS is pretty simple these days. I’m sure this has been written about a million times over as well. However, I thought it would be worthwhile to share how I do it as well. Mainly, because in addition to AJAX and effects I use Javascript as a way of enabling different CSS selectors for elements.
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Server up and down time
Sep 21 2008
Lately you may (but hopefully did not) have noticed this site being unavailable for long periods of time. It seems my hosting company has had quite the bit of trouble with the hardware running the VPS my account is hosted on.
However, they are working on it and hopefully it becomes a thing of the past.
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Acl Menu Component
Sep 13 2008
By now you’ve got an awesome Acl and Auth controlled app running. However, making navigation menus is a pain with dynamic, and variable permissions. Outside of making menu elements for each type of Aro and including them in your layout, there currently aren’t many options (at least none that I’m aware of). I was faced with this exact problem a while back, and couldn’t find a suitable solution, so I made one.
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Recent Posts
- Looking backwards and forwards
- CakePHP RC4 released
- Testing CakePHP Controllers the hard way
- DebugKit updates
- Free slides - CakeFest Argentina
- CakeFest Argentina after thoughts.
- CakeFest argentina approaches
- Making Testable Static classes
- Using bindModel to get to deep relations
- New home, new sideproject
