Open Source Software
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.
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++.
I’ve just released another plugin for CakePHP. This one helps reduce the number of HTTP requests made by helping you concatenate and compress your asset files. I’ve been working on it on and off for about 3 months now, and am pretty happy with where it is. It includes both server side and client side libraries for loading compressed files.
I’ve been doing many of the CakePHP releases, since “the great framework apocalypse of imminent doom”. Between then and now, CakePHP has had quite a few releases. During these past few months, I’ve really begun to understand the value of a simple release process. When I initially started doing releases for CakePHP, our release process involved many steps and I was doing them all manually.
Over the long Ontario weekend, I took some time to update Acl Extras. It now works with plugins and the improvements made to the Auth + Acl for 1.3. The master branch contains the CakePHP 1.3 compatible version. While the 1.0.0 tag, and 1.0 branch are still compatible with CakePHP 1.2.
You may have seen the Analog.coop site recently and found some of the easter eggs, like the grid hot keys. I loved the concept, and made a mental note to spend some time reverse engineering/rebuilding it for my own uses. Well it just so happens that the guys at Analog have released the #grid on Github, which is great because it made it easier for me to adapt the code and do some small improvements.
Earlier today I tagged and packaged up the 1.2 release of DebugKit. DebugKit 1.2 features a number of improvements and features over 1.1 which include:
Previously, I wrote about using two versions of PHP with macports . In it I covered installing PHP4 and PHP5. Since then PHP5.3 has been released as a stable release. However, I needed to maintain my PHP5.2 installation as I have a number of client projects that are on servers using PHP5.2. So to reduce version insanity I wanted to keep 5.2.
Drag resizing is a great interface interaction for web apps using panes, or window regions. Most Javascript libraries have convenient and simple methods to make drag-resizing a snap. However, what if you didn’t have a library at your disposal or were just interested in how to implement this interaction, just for the sake of knowing? Well I did just that when I implemented drag resizable panels for DebugKit 1.
If you’ve been following the ongoing development of the 1.3 branch over at code.cakephp.org:http://code.cakephp.org. You may have noticed that bake has had a significant overhaul, and a number of features and enhancements have been built in.
What started out small has grown into an ugly tangled monster. As with many people’s github accounts, mine only had a few things in it at first and all was well. But as more code was written the repository began to smell and was in need of some splitting up. So that is what has been done.
Today marks the 1.1 release of DebugKit. After using it for the past few weeks and not finding any new issues or getting and new tickets. A few new features snuck into the release, courtesy of Andy Dawson.
Hopefully by now you’ve used DebugKit , and found it to be as useful as I do. If you’ve ever wanted to add a new panel, you can and its actually quite easy to do.
Generating code coverage for test cases is a handy feature, it gives you a quick and easy way to determine how much of your code is running during your tests. It doesn’t ensure that the tests are good or that you have enough assertions, but code that doesn’t run definitely has not been tested. Before code coverage was created it was very difficult to determine how much code was being run.
So I’ve been working away on DebugKit the last few weeks. And I think its at a level where I can suggest other people give it a whirl. Its not at a stable release point. But if you are feeling adventurous and don’t mind using beta code give it a try. There are a few notable features have been added, so in no particular order here they are.
vCards are a nice added touch for an application that acts as a Address book, or contact management. vCards are easily used by most mail clients, and are a plain text standard making them nice and easy to implement. While hCard and other microformats are gaining popularity, the widespread support still doesn’t exist. Leaving vCard as the primary format to transfer contact information out of a web application
As most people know TextMate is a pretty amazing text editor, probably one of the best for MacOS. What you may not know is that CakePHP has its own textmate bundle. this bundle is maintained by Joël Perras who is also a recent addition to the CakePHP core team.
The release of the new API at http://api.cakephp.org wasn’t quite as smooth as I would have liked it. However, since the initial release things have constantly been improving. The search is now much more effective, and global functions are now in the index. So things are looking better each day. I hope to answer a few questions surrounding ApiGenerator today.