For the last few years I have been heavily involved in building web applications with the CakePHP framework. Apart from all the usual MVC, ORM, and so on, and so forth, features, I am a big fan of the CakePHP utilities. And among all of them, my long time favorite is the Inflector class.
The Inflector class makes makes word transformations a breeze – camel-casing, snake-casing, plural, singular, and so on – work like a charm at least for the English language. It’s also possible to use the same functionality for other languages, but that would require quite a bit of the linguistic expertise.
I’ve got so used to the inflections that I miss them every single time I have to step out of the CakePHP framework. This doesn’t happen very often for me in the PHP domain, but JavaScript is a totally different story.
The other day I came across the inflected library, which brings most of the CakePHP’s Inflector to JavaScript, via either a Node.JS NPM package, or a simple inclusion of the JavaScript file to the page source and laying off all the hard work on to the browser.
I’m a lot happier with my universe now.