i.justrealized

Addons.Mozilla.org is currently using CakePHP but they will no longer in 2010. They decided to adopt Django. (Source: Micropipes.com)

I have done a few projects using CakePHP the past couple of years. CakePHP has grown to become one of the more popular PHP web frameworks, think of CakePHP as Rails-inspired PHP framework.

If you’re interested in CakePHP, you may like to check out CakePHP Application Development by Packt Publishing. This book covers lots of beginner topics such as installation and configuration. It is a good book to get started on CakePHP, it has a step-by-step guide that can be useful for starters. The book targets CakePHP 1.2 however, the book is written before CakePHP 1.2 is released so it does not have updated screenshots in it.

Generally the book’s concept is correct. The explanations are written as if someone is talking to you. If you do not like that style of learning, best you avoid this title. CakePHP Application Development covers a creation of a sample app — Quickwall — at the end of the book. Unlike typical tutorials that teaches you how to create a blog with XX framework, this goes into more depth on how best to use the inbuilt features of CakePHP.

My major grip on this book is its numerous errors in code, and a couple of quite unforgiving ones too. The books could have been better edited. Some of the codes did not appear to run and you have to look around to check for syntax errors. It isn’t often, still it’s a bad impression. The codes in the book are badly indented too. This makes the codes hard to read. It’s a good book to learn, but can be better.

Find out more about CakePHP Application Development here, you can also have a look at the book’s Table of Contents here.

I’ve been busy this couple of weeks hence the lack of updates. I have been working mainly on my tool of choice — CakePHP. I mainly do my work on OS X for PHP. Recently I got involved in working for some software that requires Microsoft SQL Server, PHP and IIS. The whole shift towards the other side slowed me down a lot. I found myself being confused over the tiniest thing like where’s my host file. Where’s the php.ini? How to configure this and that. The terms are seemingly different and watching IIS crash again and again due to me incorrect configurations frustrates me.

On the brighter note, when I working in Windows I actually realized how much I missed Windows Explorer. It’s probably the single most useful utility I miss when I switch to a MacBook.

I just upgraded all the software only to discover PHP got upgraded to 5.3. That’s fast, PHP 5.3 isn’t out too long ago and it’s in the Macosforge repository. Even the CakePHP 1.2.4.8284 update released on August 9 did not include PHP 5.3 compatibility.

Perhaps it’s time to update the CakePHP requirements and be indicative of the lack of support for PHP 5.3.

Now the library is throwing deprecated notices all around “Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in…”. Also there is a PHP warning:

To stop the deprecated notices, I had to modify Cake’s core, not something I like to do.

I added the line “error_reporting (E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED);” at the top of /cake/libs/object.php. I also updated /cake/libs/configure.php by changing “error_reporting(E_ALL);” to “error_reporting (E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED);”.

This doesn’t solve the problem exactly, it just suppresses the deprecation notices so I can continue working. For a PHP 5.3 compatible CakePHP, you’ll need to use CakePHP 1.3 which currently isn’t stable. I’ll definitely be trying it soon but in the meantime I’ll just have to suppress error reporting.

Update: jdbartlett commented on a better way:

If you’re not doing any debugging, you can add the above code to the top of /app/webroot/index.php and suppress the error messages without editing the core.

Thanks jdbartlett! You saved me time.

NetBeans IDE 6.7 Milestone 3 is released. I have been using this for a few days. I haven’t noticed much difference actually. I use it for PHP. I still wish for more support on CakePHP.

The NetBeans team is pleased to announce the availability of NetBeans IDE 6.7 Milestone 3 (M3).

Highlights of the release include: 

• Project Kenai Integration
  - Create Kenai projects from within the NetBeans IDE
  - Locate and open sources for Kenai projects in the IDE
  - Full integration with Bugzilla
• Maven
  - Multi-tabbed artifact details viewer available
  - Graphical view of transitive dependencies available
• PHP
  - Code coverage and Selenium support
• Platform
  - Enhancements to Output WIndow, Update Center catalog and Search performance
• Profiler
  - Export profiling data into CSV, HTML and XML file formats
• C/C++
  - Easy host setup for remote development
• GlassFish Integration
  - Derby support registers Derby associated with v3 Prelude instance
• Integration with the Hudson Continuous Integration server

Read the complete list of NetBeans IDE 6.7 Milestone 3 features and enhancements. 

XAMPP is one of the easiest options to develop using PHP or PHP CLI. I use CakePHP for development and one of the features of CakePHP is to back the MVC. In this guide, we’ll see how to get started. This tutorial doesn’t teach you how to use CakePHP’s bake feature. This guide is specifically written for Windows Vista or Windows 7.

0. Objective

To run XAMPP’s PHP CLI, you first have to set up the environment variables for PHP CLI. Also introduce how to get started on CakePHP’s console.

1. Setting up environment variables

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This is more of a personal note. You may find it useful too.

Here’s how to ignore files and folders using Git. You can create a file “.gitignore” and place in the files and folders that you wish to ignore (separated with a line break).

In the file: “./.gitignore”

Here’s a list of standard things to do a .gitignore. It ignores the thumbnail files generated by Mac OSX and Windows. (I’m on Windows Vista.) You can place this on the top folder of your Git project:

“nbproject” is for NetBeans.

In the file: “./app/.gitignore”

Well, if you use CakePHP, you may want to add an additional .gitignore file in your CakePHP app directory:

I am open to suggestions what other files or folders are good to ignore but these are all I can recall. You can read more about gitignore at kernal.org.