Writing

The new face of CakePHP's API

If you’ve been to the http://api.cakephp.org today you may have noticed a few changes. First its no longer powered by doxygen. Doxygen has been giving us a few headaches in the last few months. So gwoo and myself have taken it upon ourselves to write our own Api generation tool. We called it ApiGenerator you can see it running at api.cakephp.org.

Paginating long lists in the CakePHP Console

I’ve recently been doing some work on some CLI tools, and I came across the need to “paginate” a long list of file. Instead of dumping out 40+ items to the screen all at once, which would be confusing and hard to read, I wanted a more elegant way of showing only a section on the huge list at once.

Looking backwards and forwards

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.

CakePHP RC4 released

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.

Testing CakePHP Controllers the hard way

By now you already know or should know about CakeTestCase::testAction() and the wondrous things it can do. However, testAction has 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.

CakeFest Argentina after thoughts.

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.

CakeFest argentina approaches

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.

Using bindModel to get to deep relations

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

New home, new sideproject

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.

AclExtras Shell

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.

Getting a new Oven, Migrating from CakePHP 1.1 to 1.2

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.