Things tagged with Web Development
Web development related topics
-
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. -
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
CakePHP Easter eggs
Sep 03 2008
The documentation for CakePHP has grown in leaps and bounds since the creation of the cookbook. Today I wanted to look at a few methods and conventions that may not be crystal clear from reading the book or api.
Object::_set().
Object is the parent class for almost all other classes in CakePHP.
-
Anatomy of a CakePHP Test Case
Aug 23 2008
With all the talk of testing going on, I thought it would be good to look at how tests work and what is makes them tick. SimpleTest handles the bulk of test case execution, however, there are a few CakePHP specifics that are not part of a normal
SimpleTest::UnitTestCase. -
Reducing requestAction() use in your CakePHP sites with fat models
Aug 15 2008
When bakers first start using CakePHP there is a tendency to use
requestAction()more often than it should be. OftenrequestAction()gets used to pull in common elements like recent posts or new comments, or to make menus. This makes sense in a way as it keeps the comments code in theCommentsControllerand all is well. -
Generate ACO records for your controllers and actions with AcoSyncShell
Aug 01 2008
Continuing in my previous vein of ACL related topics. I’ve got another handy addition to the ACL user’s toolbox.
-
Aco Sync Shell for CakePHP
Aug 01 2008
A CakePHP shell to automate the creation and syncing of ACO's generated from an application's controllers and actions.
-
Quick and dirty 'Down for Maintenance' page with CakePHP
Jul 25 2008
Websites need maintenance, and sometimes that maintenance requires the site to go down for a little bit as you tweak the database, add additional capacity or make large changes to the application code. In these circumstances you cannot afford to have users mucking about on your application. However, you might need access to ensure all your amazing upgrades go smoothly or perhaps do the upgrading inside the application itself.
-
Creating easy reports with pivot tables
Jul 19 2008
I’ve been working on a project that collects various surveys and stores the data very much like below.
While this is a data structure is very normalized and provides a flexible base to build various surveys with. What it does not provide is an easy interface for building reports.
-
Auth and ACL an end to end tutorial pt.2
Jul 13 2008
If you are looking for part one go here
In the last article we created the basic models, controllers and views for our Auth and Acl controlled app as well as initialized the Acl tables. We also bound our groups and users to the Acl through the use of the
AclBehavior. -
Auth and ACL an end to end tutorial pt. 1
Jul 07 2008
Now, there are many tutorials out there for Auth and ACL in CakePHP. However, none of them (as far as I know of) cover putting together Auth and ACL from beginning to end. That is what I’m going to do in this article. I am splitting the article into two parts; the first about setting up our app and getting the Aros running, the second on building Acos and putting it all together.
-
Introducing the Webservice Behavior
Jul 04 2008
As webservices grow so does the need for being able to communicate with them in an easy fashion. This simple blog alone uses 2 webservices. The recent tracks at the bottom is a feed I pull from Last.fm and my spam protection is provided by Akismet. When first building my site I looked for an already built solution and found a partial solution in Felix Geisendörfer’s WebModel.
-
Eating my own dogfood Upgrading to CakePHP RC1
Jun 13 2008
Well today I took the time to upgrade to CakePHP 1.2 RC1 in the spirit of ‘eating your own dogfood’. I got the usual warnings about
vendor()being deprecated. I also took the time to switch over all my Bindable calls to the fresh core Containable Behavior. Which for the most part consisted of changingrestrict()calls tocontain()calls. -
CakePHP RC1 released
Jun 05 2008
Earlier today a CakePHP 1.2 RC1 was released. You can read the full changelog
or read the official announcement to learn about whats been going on since the beta. Also download a new Cake and smell the fresh icing. -
PHP's isset() and arrays
Jun 01 2008
Earlier this week I learned that
isset()behaves a little differently than I had expected when dealing with arrays. Now I already knew thatisset()would return false on a variable not existing, or being set to null. However, I was not expecting it to return false on an array key existing and being set to null. -
CSS expressions in IE and scoping
May 07 2008
All versions of Internet Explorer from 5.5 forward support CSS expressions. If you are not familiar with CSS expressions in IE, they are a powerful and non-standard way commonly used to plug the gaping and vast holes in IE’s CSS support.
-
Code Coverage in CakePHP 1.2 Test Suite
Apr 30 2008
Super fresh in the SVN builds of CakePHP 1.2 is the new code coverage analysis. If you are living on the bleeding edge of cake development or just want a preview of the neat things to come once 1.2 is complete read on.
The guys at debuggable have contributed a fantastic tool to the testing suite for CakePHP 1.2.
-
Understanding MVC and CakePHP
Apr 20 2008
Continuing with the trend of CakePHP information here, I’m going to cover some of the acronyms and lexicon of CakePHP. I hang out a lot on #cakephp and there are repeating trends in some of the questions that get asked so hopefully I can answer some of those questions here. As well as provide a bit of my personal experiences.
-
Fancy routing examples with CakePHP 1.2
Apr 15 2008
Routing in CakePHP is quite flexible in how you can route your urls to your controllers and actions. Offering both variable replacement and regex routing. You can route almost any parameter that is set by dispatcher and more. So lets try a few of these.
-
Geshi Helper for CakePHP
Apr 05 2008
GeSHi or the Generic Syntax Highlighter is a simple yet powerful syntax highlighter for many languages. Implemented in many CMS. When I wanted syntax highlighting for my postings I decided to implement GeSHi. I wanted to share my implementation of GeSHi as a CakePHP helper.
-
Geshi Helper
Apr 05 2008
A Helper Class for CakePHP providing an easy to use interface for the GeSHi syntax highlighter. Read more at geshi helper for CakePHP
-
Creating RSS feeds with CakePHP and extensionless routing
Mar 28 2008
Making RSS feeds and alternative content types other than HTML opens a lot of options in how your content can be used, displayed and combined. In prior version of cakePHP webservices were indicated by prefixing a url with the desired content type so an xml version of a blog index might look like
xml/posts/index.
Search
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
