Viraj Khatavkar wrote this blog post showing how to use Integrated Package for better testing in CakePHP. Testing in general is not a simple subject, so anything to assist with it is very very welcome.
I’m sure we’ll be trying it at work in the next week or two.
Events are a great way to separate the business logic of your application and make things simpler and, often, faster. CakePHP framework introduced an events system in version 2.1, and since then it got much better. The official documentation covers current implementation pretty well. But in this post I wanted to link to a few articles that provide more of a historical perspective.
First, goes this blog post by Martin Bean from back in 2013. It shows how things were initially. Even with all the improvements in version 3, the first implementation was still pretty useful.
Second, comes this review of the CakePHP events system (still in version 2), and some profiling of this new functionality. These guys looked at all the details and eventually suggested some improvements.
Their effort didn’t go unnoticed. Mark Story, one of the lead developers of CakePHP framework, wrote this blog post, explaining the upcoming (at the time) changes to the events system in CakePHP version 3.
As a result CakePHP 3 event system is a much simpler and cleaner implementation. Have a look at this guide for a quick introduction.
I’m sure this is not the end of the road, as no software is ever perfect. But it’s a good place to be.
These are some really good news – Phinx joins CakePHP family! If you are from a different technology stack and not familiar with these, Phinx is an excellent database migrations tool, which has been used by CakePHP framework for a while now. The two worked great together. Now that they are under the same roof, I’m expecting even more goodies!
We are very excited to announce that Phinx has joined the CakePHP team. The Github project has already been moved to the CakePHP organisation. The project itself will stay MIT-licensed but be gradually transformed into a Cake Software Foundation project. Other great news is that the current way to install and update Phinx remains unchanged.
As you are aware, CakePHP has been using Phinx since 3.0.0 for database migrations. The CakePHP Core team welcomes the opportunity to look after and maintain the project and will now start making changes to bring the code in line with the CakePHP (our) coding standards. As well as cleaning up issues and PR’s soon. We will be following up with our plans for the code and setting roadmaps in the coming weeks.
We welcome Phinx to the CakePHP family and hope to see Rob Morgan, Richard Quadling, Woody Gilk around!
For a large project at work, we need to integrate or develop a workflow engine. I worked a little bit with workflow engines in the past, but the subject is way to big and complex for me to claim any expertise in it.
So, I am looking at what’s available these days and what are our options. This post is a collection of initial links and thoughts, and it’s goal is mostly to document my research process and findings, and not to provide any answers or solutions yet.
Continue reading Getting started with workflows in PHP
CakePHP 3 has an excellent support for command line Shells, Tasks, and Console Tools. There are a few that are bundled with the framework itself, and that come from a variety of plugins. And, of course, you can have your own commands, specific to your application.
$ ./bin/cake Welcome to CakePHP v3.4.3 Console --------------------------------------------------------------- App : src Path: /home/leonid/Work/cakephp_test/src/ PHP : 7.0.16 --------------------------------------------------------------- Current Paths: * app: src * root: /home/leonid/Work/cakephp_test * core: /home/leonid/Work/cakephp_test/vendor/cakephp/cakephp Available Shells: [Bake] bake [DebugKit] benchmark, whitespace [Migrations] migrations [CORE] cache, i18n, orm_cache, plugin, routes, server [app] console To run an app or core command, type `cake shell_name [args]` To run a plugin command, type `cake Plugin.shell_name [args]` To get help on a specific command, type `cake shell_name --help`
There is one tiny little annoyance though. Sometimes, it’s useful to get an output of the CakePHP Shell and use it in another script. For example, you might need to get a list of all loaded plugins and loop over them, performing another action, outside of CakePHP. Say, in a bash script. Getting a list of loaded plugins is easy with the bundled shell like so:
$ ./bin/cake plugin loaded Welcome to CakePHP v3.4.3 Console --------------------------------------------------------------- App : src Path: /home/leonid/Work/cakephp_test/src/ PHP : 7.0.16 --------------------------------------------------------------- Bake DebugKit Migrations
But, as you can see, the output is not very useful for machine processing. The welcome header is in the way. Sure, you can parse it out with regular expressions, or even a simple line count. But that lacks elegance. Is there a better way? I thought there was.
My first approach was to use the –quiet option, which, I thought, would leave me with just the needed output. It turns out, that’s not what it does. It strips out all the output, and there is no list of plugins at all.
The second approach worked out better. I learned about it from this thread. The solution is to extend the needed CakePHP shell and overwrite the protected _welcome() method. Here’s the content of the newly created application level shell in src/Shell/PluginShell.php:
<?php
namespace App\Shell;
use Cake\Shell\PluginShell as Shell;
class PluginShell extends Shell
{
/**
* Silence the welcome message
*
* @return void
*/
protected function _welcome()
{
}
}
And now running the same command as before produces a cleaner output:
$ ./bin/cake plugin loaded Bake DebugKit Migrations
This now can be easily used in other scripts without any need for regular expressions and other trimming techniques.