Don't code, bake.
An introduction to CakePHP

GREAT SCOTT!

Happy Back to the Future Day!

Introduction

PHP Developerat UK Web Mediain Weyhillhttp://www.ukwm.co.uk

Cyberstalk me!https://twitter.com/YellDavidhttps://github.com/davidyellhttp://careers.stackoverflow.com/davidyellhttp://uk.linkedin.com/in/davidyell

#cakephp on Freenode IRC

David Yellaka Neon1024

Six years commercial experience, mostly agencies doing campaign work.Started with HTML on GeoCities.Self-taught myself PHP whilst building an arbiter for the Howling Rain alliance in Planetarion.UKWM do campaign and affiliate marketing work, we are recruiting for another developer so if this presentation sounds like something you'd be interested in let me know and I can hook you up.This is my first presentation so be gentle!I will hopefully have some time at the end for questions.

CakePHP 3isAwesomeCakePHP is awesome and I think so, and hopefully after this presentation you will to.

What is CakePHP?
CakePHP makes building web applications simpler, faster and require less code.

RAD
Rapid Application Development

MVCModel View Controller

So I mentioned RAD and MVC. Everyone heard of these two principles?Wikipedia says In general, RAD approaches to software development put less emphasis on planning tasks and more emphasis on development.It's worth noting that you do want to still do a little planning, mostly with your database. What information you want to store and how to store it.In essence it's more about building stuff than chatting about building stuff.MVC is about creating separation of concerns and keeping code clean and DRY (don't repeat yourself) which is related to refactoring for me at least, but that's a bit off topic here.

CakePHP eh?

Framework

Docs

2005!

CakePHP is a PHP based MVC RAD framework. The idea is to allow rapid development of applications but also be flexible enough to allow customisation and further development.In the top 10 most starred php frameworks on github (pos 8)Two released major versions, 2.x and 3.xVersion 3.x currently released, under active development, nearly 7k commits to 3.x before release. Since release of 3.0.0 there have been 850 commits. 3.0.9 just released this week.More than 8 million visitors to the framework websiteOver 31 million page views of the website10 years of life! Completely open source, community driven development.Mention that anyone can contribute and is welcome to do so, it's encouraged.Talk about the documentation being maintained and that people can also contribute back it quickly and easily, the 'improve button'CakeFest 2014 had over 110 attendees from 22 different countries!CakePHP maintains a presence in social media, with twitter, facebook, google groups, youtube, podcast and active stack overflow community.

Why is Cake good?

Convention over configuration

Less of this

More of thisInstead of configuring your application you can simply stick to conventions in the framework to have everything work out of the box.Of course you can override the conventions when and if you want to.For example you can have a Table reading from a db table with a different name if you want.Again, I'm lazy. I like not writing and validating YAML or XML.Anyone hate things not working when there is a missing character in your configuration? I do.Plural db tables, plural Table classes, singular Entities, plural Controllers and plural Template folders.

For example a database table called 'people' would have a model class called 'Person' and use the 'PeopleController' and have it's views in the 'people' folder.Cakes inflector will take care of pluralisation and singularisation of words. You can obviously add your own rules, but it currently understands things such as the example, and also fish and sheep.

Do work.Make people happy.???Profit!

Why should I use it?
CakePHP makes building web applications simpler, faster and require less code.

I want to be happyI want to make people happy. They might be my colleagues, clients or internal project stakeholders.I want you guys to be happy.Happiness breads motivation. It helps you guys get out of bed and build awesome applications every day.This mean delivering applications and functionality to project stakeholders on time and in budget.Using a RAD MVC framework you're able to develop complex applications very quickly, iterate early, and fast, but still to a high standard.A framework helps to give a standardised basis of work for developers meaning that code becomes more transferrable and easier to maintain.The 'profit' here might be happyness, it might be motivation, it might be a happy client, a great application, a fully passing test suite, green CI reports. All kinds of things.

Make sure to pick the right tool for the job. Noone can claim that any one tool or framework is a blanket tool for all cases.

I rebuilt my companies most profitable website from a legacy system to cakephp, due to a deadline, in one week and it's still live and living happily.It even went live on a Friday of a bank holiday when I had the Tuesday off. I don't test, but when I do, I do it in production!

Cake is tested on Linux and Windows, as well as tested in HHVM

What's in the box?

5.4

ORM

Simpler configuration

External libraries

Framework components

Has full composer support.3.x has a minimum requirement of php 5.4.16The ORM (db layer) has been written to be very lazy and use query objects.Routing api has been rewrittenMore consistent and now simpler to configure, now just one app.php file to setup your application, so less faff with Git and setup in production.Slicker Configuration class allowing easier config accessMaking more use of external libraries such as Carbon, Aura and Password Compat (for php5.4)

Freebies!

BehavioursCounter cache

Timestamp

Translate

Tree

ComponentsAuthentication

Cookie

CSRF

Flash

Paginator

Request Handler

Security

UtilitiesCaching

Email

File & Folder

Hash

HttpClient

Inflector

Internationalisation and localisation

Logging

Number

Router

Security

String

Time

Xml

HelpersFlash

Form

Html

Number

Paginator

Rss

Session

Text

Time

Url

No need to worry about Composer dependancies!All this is included! Think of all the things you could build with so many handy tools right at your fingertips!Hash is a utility class which is used to doing operations on arrays using X-Path notation. Such as stripping out all Posts with a certain tag from a set of data.The rest I'm sure you can work out what they do from their names. You'll notice Number and Time, these use the library classes which are wrapped into the Number and Time helpers, so you can use the functionality in models or controllers.In 3.x a number of these classes have been changed around, some, like the FlashComponent are due to refactoring elsewhere, in this case the SessionComponent.

Model
Tables and Entities

Repository pattern

Tables find your entities

Loves to play with Databases

Tables serve up tasty entities

Varied shared behaviour

Example

src/Model/Table/PostsTable.phpsrc/Model/Entity/Post.php

Table classQuery objectDatabaseclassDB DriverDatastore

Anything to do with data should be in a model.Extends AppModel.Fat models are good, many functions can be refactored into models to keep your controllers thin and allow your controllers to access the methods through the model.A datasource actually does the heavy lifting against the data provider. So you can create any datasource you want and it remains transparent to the model.Can write a datasource for anything, mysql, mongo, api, etcModels store contain your data when it's returned.In 3.x you'll get a query object instead which contains a collection of objects.Used to build relationships between objects in the application. Post hasMany Tag for example would be defined in the model.Deals with data validation in your forms using the rules defined in your models.

Behaviors
Share the love

Refactor shared model methods

Reusable code

Complex data operations

Callbacks

Dynamic attachment

Models

SharedLogic

Behavior

Spelling. 'murica

Behaviours are essentially mixins for your models.

In order to keep your fat models organised any shared logic or callbacks that you need to apply to multiple models can be refactored into a behaviour. This allows you to easily attach that behaviour to any model to give it access to that functionality.

Example, you want to timestamp when a record changes. You'd go right in for the 'beforeSave()' method to add a timestamp to the data. However you don't want to write the same code in the same callback in each model. So why not make a Timestamp behaviour, which you can then attach to the models which you want to have timestamping. Simples!

Examples: Containable, Linkable, Translate, Listable

Controller
The brain

Dad for the day

Bosses the Model

Herds the View

Looks after the request

Callbacks

RequestRoutingControllerModelView

Extends AppController so there is inheritance.Dad for the day! It deals with both the incoming request object, preparing the response object and dispatching the view.The controller has a single responsibility. So an OrdersController deals with orders. A UsersController deals with Users.Contains public methods called actions, which are your 'things which do things'. Such as Add, Edit, View and Delete.Has callbacks allowing you to change data and perform operations at various stages of the controller execution. BeforeFilter, beforeRender and afterFilter()

Components
Share the love

Refactor shared controller methods

Reusable code

Callbacks

Dynamic attachment

Controllers

SharedLogic

Component

Components are similar to Behaviours in that they are mixins for your Controllers.If you are writing the same logic in lots of controllers, stop! And think about refactoring the code into a component. Always keep code DRY.Don't be tempted to put public controller actions into a component! Think more about actual php code that those methods might need and refactor that.

Example, Session, Pagination, Security

Views
The pretty bit

Response

Works with the Controller

Shiny veneer

DataLayoutTemplate

ViewExample

src/Template//index.ctp

So our routing has found the controller, the controller has got the data from our model and has set it to the view.The V in MVC. Responsible for generating specific output required for the request.This could be HTML, Xml or Json depending on the request. It might even be a PDF or another file for download.By default, most views are HTML using the .ctp extension (cake template) which is just standard php+html.The framework has automatic Json and Xml views built in which can be used using the RequestHandlerComponent. This makes building API's super easy as you don't need to worry about building your api output.Layout file to implement our shared html. Layouts wrap views common markup should be in the layout. Eg, JS & CSSTemplates can be extended from each other, so if you want to break up your common view parts into views to inherit from you can do that.The actual view template should have no logic ideally, but you'll end up with some foreachs in most cases. Refactoring view logic uses helpers which we'll come onto shortly.

Helpers
Share the love

Give views some brains

Wrap up complex functionality

Reusable

ViewNumberFormHtmlPaginatorTextTimeHelpers are the component-like classes for the presentation layer of your application. They contain presentational logic that is shared between many views, elements, or layouts.As helpers are actual classes any complex functionality can be easily wrapped into a helper to prevent adding of logic to templates.Here are some of the core helpers. Form helper deals with generating form fields. The Time helper for example can do 'time ago in words' and such. So anything which requires some logic. If you start writing PHP in your views, stop and think about using a helper instead.Helpers are portable. You can reuse them in different projects so it's always worth making the code and output quite generic so that you can reuse them.For UKWM we have a php prices library for calculating prices, annual, monthly, averages, etc and I have wrapped this into a helper, so that I can, in my view, simply say $this->Price->monthly() and get a monthly price.

An extra slice of views

Build complex templates

Reusable and extendable

Dynamic shared content

Complex data

Elements

View Cells

BlocksView

In 2.x dynamic elements required requestAction() which was bad because it needed caching due to the dispatch cycle. In 3.x this has gone and Cells are in to replace it.Cells have their own controller and view file. They are ideal for reusable page parts which need logic, data and specific rendering. Cells do not dispatch sub-requests making them more efficient than requestAction(). Eg, data driven nav, sidebar with category counts.Elements which are shared static HTML which can be included in any view. This allows you to build a static navigation, sidebar or similar with only one place for the markup. Data can be passed into elements and they can be cached easily.Blocks allow for shared content in memory, but can be appended to from the view. Mostly used to for things like javascript and meta. So you can append javascript to the end of your whole page from the view.

Bake for 5 minutes

Using Bake you can complete the Bookmarker tutorial in under 5 minutes!

By using the convention over configuration we are able to leverage the automated coding tools in the shell to write out our basic code for us.The bake shell task allows rapid prototyping of features or for you to just build a whole site out to see how it'll work. You can then proceed to customise the application as you need.The great thing with the bake shell specifically is that the code generated is based on a bake theme, which you can customise. So if you want to change anything that is being generated you can simply change the bake theme and rebake to get new code!I've actually built a plugin which has my own bake theme for generating my admin areas so that I can include all the customisations that I like, such as Twitter bootstrap right away.They always say that if you do something more than three times you should automate it, so why not the same with how you automatically generate your code?So here I have created an ERD in MySQL Workbench and used the forward engineer tool to build my database automatically. Then I can use the bake shell task to automatically build my application code.From here I can run it in my browser using the built in php server. By running 'Console/cake server'.

Plugins

Applications in applications

Can wrap anything

Distributable

Self contained

Single responsibility functionality

Plugins are essentially a Cake application. They can be linked and executed inside your cake application as if they were application code.A plugin could provide any functionality to your application, from a Users plugin for managing users, with full stack MVC layers, or it might be a single behaviour for attaching to a model.Any Cake elements which you would like to reuse in more than one application, think about refactoring it into a plugin.In most cases plugins generally contain Behaviours, Components and Helpers, as they provide the ability to add extra functionality to existing objects within your application.

The book

CakeBot: Book is http://book.cakephp.org the answer to life, the universe and all your bun making needs.

Convinced?

So you're convinced right? This is awesome. It's fast, it's easy and best of all it does what you want and doesn't get in your way when you want to do something different.So what is the first step? Where do I start?

Got to blog tut slide ->

Getting started

Bookmarker tutorial

Ecosystem

http://cakephp.org Book http://book.cakephp.org

Plugins http://plugins.cakephp.org

https://github.com/cakephp

Check the core teams repositories for more stuff

Use Muffin https://github.com/usemuffin

Friends of Cake www.friendsofcake.com

Everything is on Github. The framework source code, the core developers, most of the plugins, pretty much everything. I'd recommend searching Github for anything you might need as a first port of call.There is also the 'Community' menu on the Cake website, which has links to pretty much every community presence for CakePHP across the internet.I've included the two main sites here, book and plugins which I use on a daily basis.The Friends of Cake initiative was started by a few of the core team and has since branched out to include some of the community also. I am a member of this team. We have a bunch of useful plugins and tools available.If you would like to use Composer with the 2.x branch, we have that already setup here. We also have CakePHP Vagrant + Puppet boxes setup here if you want to try those.I would also recommend checking the core team members personal profiles on Github. Most of them spend time working on Cake plugins in their spare time and you'll find that work in their own repos. It's also worth following so that you can help out with projects that they are working on. The core team are all really nice people and they are usually happy to get feedbacks, ideas and pull requests for things they are working on.
If in doubt, ask.

Thanks!

Questions?

Feedback?https://joind.in/15858

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