CakePHP 1.2 Stable Has Arrived
By David Golding
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Some of the best news came yesterday: CakePHP 1.2 Final has been released. First, I want to congratulate all the Cake devs out there that made this happen. We have a lot to look forward to with you guys having accomplished this important milestone.
What this means for the framework, I think in the short run, is some immediate attention. Big releases like these attract notice, and with Cake already having a sizable audience, I expect new users to give Cake a serious go. Which of course means some work for those of us that have contributed to the documentation efforts. I plan on overhauling the Beginning CakePHP book and updating the whole thing immediately for the new release. All of my adjustments will be posted on this site.
Now that we’ve got a solid Cake core to work with, it’s time to put together some killer apps and continue building up the community. I, for one, feel much more confident about advertising the framework, now that massive structural changes to the core have been decided upon and implemented.
Happy baking, all, and have a wonderful New Year!
Review of Practical CakePHP Projects Book
By David Golding
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In recent months, new documentation for CakePHP has been rolling off the press. I’m pleased to forward on to you the newest addition, Kai Chan and John Omokore’s Practical CakePHP Projects. In this post, I’ll give my review of the book, which I hope proves useful for you interested Cake users out there.
Contents
The chapters, in general, focus on one project at a time. In order, here are the projects you’ll build with the book:
- Blog (of course… :) )
- Shopping Cart
- Message Forum Web Service
- Google Maps App
- Twitter and Google Translator Mashups
- Unit and Web Tests
- Control Panel
- Translation
- Custom Automagic Fields
- Templates/Tags
- Dynamic Data Fields
- Captcha
These projects aren’t designed to be absolutely conclusive, in other words, when building the shopping cart, you won’t be building a complete cart solution like ZenCart or Magento (this would probably end up being a book all by itself). But, the tutorials do apply Cake principles to application development and will produce a working application that performs useful methods and tasks.
Pluses
Why I’d encourage you to buy the book… If you’re like me, you want to see code samples of live apps that you can tinker with. In fact, the best way I learn anything is to see working code and dissect it, and manipulate it until I know what’s going on and how I can use it to fit my needs. In theory, my Beginning CakePHP book wanted to ground the reader in the overall principles of Cake development, and though I was pleased with how much code samples I was able to include, it was a fine line between overloading the reader in early phases of learning Cake and giving just the right amount of working code. In other words, I feared putting out too much code that may not make sense to beginners without explaining what was happening.
Well, Practical CakePHP Projects takes on a different theory. In a way, it assumes you’ve read my book or an introduction like it, and goes from there. The chapter on “Cake Fundamentals” does explain some basics for getting a Cake app going, but it still presupposes some knowledge in the framework. Practical CakePHP Projects gives you lots of code, with explanations of what’s happening, but is not so nit-picky that you get drawn out definitions of every line. For the coder familiar with Cake but wanting to see it applied to various projects, this is your book, and it does this well.
Minuses
Though I worked as the technical reviewer on this book, I hope this post here isn’t overly biased. No book is perfect, and useful feedback will help us all as we try to use Cake and make it a better and more widely used platform. I will be upfront: I do have an interest in this book’s success, though I don’t get paid at all for its sales or anything. My interest is two-fold: I’ve had a great experience with Apress and I’ve been spared many an hour due to Cake’s awesomeness. I truly want to see Cake see wider acceptance and use, and the first step is that the platform be sweet (which it is) and the second step is to make the documentation understandable, easy, useful, accessible, etc. Like business gurus know all too well about location, for an emerging platform it’s all about “documentation, documentation, documentation.”
Practical CakePHP Projects adds to the repertoire of Cake docs that leads new users in the right path. But some code samples overly use the controller when a better paradigm would distribute code across the MVC. But let me fore-mention this, and I still believe you’ll have a good experience with the book. Super advanced readers might quibble over some of the code or concepts, but that’s unavoidable. What’s important is that those readers who currently are new to Cake or are looking for ways to improve their working knowledge of the framework get good documentation and useful examples to work with, which I believe this book will do for you. So my own issues with the book included the dependence on the controller to get things done, some naming conventions, and, really only the Captcha chapter. Aside from these concerns, which I believe are minimal, I’m excited about having in one book a nice assortment of applied Cake code.
From Here…
Now, in this sense, I’m definitely biased: I’d love to see you read my book “Beginning CakePHP” (can’t get on my case for that, would you?). But if that’s not in your plans, at least give Practical CakePHP Projects a try. It does operate in a different mind-set, one of giving you lots of code samples to work with, and so getting your feet wet in Cake won’t take long at all with this book. If my book and this one are in your plans, I’d expect after reading these two that you’ll have a firm grounding in Cake and will be ready for as advanced methods as Cake can offer you.
If you’d like more specific reactions about the book, please catch me in Readers’ Forum or drop me line through my contact form. And, from one Cake baker to another, Happy Baking!
Anno Domini on GitHub
By David Golding
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Anno Domini has needed some work, now that CakePHP has progressed since the last release, which was quite awhile ago. Since then I wrote the book, graduated from college, got back into college, reviewed another book (”Practical CakePHP Projects”), built two seriously amazing private applications, worked far into a third, and by far the most complicated app of my illustrious :) career, moved twice, and wrote five detailed academic papers. Busy, and my excuse for not revisiting AD for some time.
But, I recently decided to get the code out there in a format where any other developers that might want to contribute could actually get access. I tried subversion on CakeForge and really just screwed things up (I’m not the most experienced chap at svn…). But I’ve been doing a bunch in git recently, and decided to give GitHub a try. I’ll just say I’m hooked. And since the Cake dev team put together The Chaw which appears to be using git, or at least a git-svn bridge, I have hopes that CakeForge may someday include git for its SCM.
Anyway, I encourage you to checkout AD GitHub and fork it, tinker with it, and contribute if you can. If you’re wanting to see some Cake code in action, for those newbies out there, this is a great app to get your feet wet in. I’m pretty sure the changes I’ve made in the last little bit will ensure AD is at least compatible with RC3, so it should install now, but I haven’t yet updated the installation guide (PDF) to reflect some structural changes in the app, you’ll just have to experiment with it if you aren’t already familiar with typical Cake install procedures.
Well, it’s late, and I’ve got more writing to do before Monday at 9 :) Anyone know a thing or to about Derridean deconstruction technique and religious studies? Ah, well, hopefully the weekend won’t be too destroyed.
