This week I’ve been participating in the SQLServer Jump-in Camp. My focus for the workshops have been building out better support for IIS and SQL Server in CakePHP. As I generally develop on MacOS, I do development for other platforms through virtual machines. This has worked well with linux servers in the past.
I’m pretty prone to making stupid mistakes all the time. I think its a mixture of being busy, and being a natural scatter brain. In any case, mistakes happen, and thankfully over time developers have come up with a number of ways to combat mistakes. These usually take the shape in automated toolds. Unit tests are a great way to automated tool to help prevent stupid mistakes from happening, Git commit hooks are another.
I’ve recently been working a fair bit on the new documentation for CakePHP and while sphinx is amazing, it doesn’t come with a built-in domain for generating PHP documentation.
In a previous article I covered how CakePHP would potentially be moving to using sphinx for the 2.0 documentation. Myself and some of the other CakePHP developers have been working on this option, and seeing if it has any legs. Turns out that sphinx is actually a pretty great tool.
Today, I tagged the 0.3 release for my AssetCompress plugin. A few new features have been added, and several issues resolved. You can get the code from github
The AssetCompress shell is now able to generate all the build files that are named in your project. This is great for integration with build/deployment scripts.
In the release announcement for 1.3.7, it was tentatively announced that CakePHP would be moving its documentation over to ReST, Git and sphinx. Having documentation in a git repo, and using sphinx to generate documentation has a few nice wins, that would be difficult to achieve with the current book application.
I recently had a fun idea, that I wanted to try and implement for PHPUnit. I really like coloured console output. PHPUnit already has the option for coloured output, but I wanted more. I wanted to get coloured text for F, E, S, and I that showed up in the test run progress.
This time last year, amid rumours that the end of CakePHP was nigh, CakePHP died and rose from the dead . The year that followed those events, has been a very exciting one. CakePHP continues to be a thriving project with huge popularity, and a growing community. This year has a number of milestones as well.
Previously I wrote about the changes that have been done for the request handling in CakePHP 2.0. Response handling is another subsystem that has received a significant facelift. As with request information and functionality, response related features were spread across several objects. Controller, RequestHandler and Dispatcher all had a slice of the pie.
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.
Errors and error reporting an important part of the development and debugging cycle. In interpreted languages, there are a number of runtime errors that can really help you debug your code. Some languages like python don’t give you a way to make the errors go away, but for better or worse PHP does.
NoSQL datasources are becoming a bigger part of our everyday life as web developers. If you haven’t heard about it before, MongoDB is a SQL free database built in C++.