News

Wow. I figured with the holidays and New Years coming up there would be no news to write about. Was I wrong. If you haven't heard the major news then you must have been frozen in carbonite for the last two weeks. I mean if this is the first time you're hearing this historic announcement then how can you consider yourself a CakePHP developer? That's right - it's finally been released...the best version of CakePHP ever...RC4!!!

In other less noteworthy news, 1.2 Final was also released. My favorite 1.2 announcement post was this one, which came two days after the release, but was still titled "Breaking news." Also the author somehow missed reading about the release here, here, here, here, or here, and admits they heard about it after being notified by roryy.

To celebrate the release of 1.2 there is a new "The Show" podcast featuring Rafael Bandeira interviewing Nate. Noteworthy bits in the podcast include Nate hinting at JavaScript changes for 1.3 and promising that there will never be such a long gap between releases. By my calculation that puts the release date for CakePHP 1.3 as 12/24/2010. Mark it down. (Not to harp on the time between releases, but I had to correct the subconscious typo "CakePHP 1.2 Finally" like 10 times in this post.)

Also in the podcast Rafael and Nate said some kind words about this blog, which was surprising and appreciated. If I hadn't got this sweet 22in monitor for Xmas that would have been the highlight of my week.

One last thing about the podcasts in general. If Nate doesn't get a new microphone by the next one, I'm going to start filing core bug tickets with titles like "Nate should be allowed in the room for podcasts instead of having to shout through that closed window" and "Nate should use a text-to-speech system for future podcasts." Seriously, can we get a new donate link on cakephp.org specifically for this cause?

Tickets and Commits

There are four tickets at the moment for 1.2 Final, but only one of them has been assigned and it's related to Oracle so it really only effects like one person. It took 15 commits to go from RC4 to Final, closing 5 tickets along the way.

In The Wild

One new CakePHP site since the last digest. The site is shhh.tv and although it's flash heavy, Mark Holt writes that the backend is all CakePHP. So if you're in the mood to answer a long and tedious questioner, where the payoff is a sketchy looking Santa giving an un-funny gift suggestion, then this is the site for you.

In The Blogs

Lots of good blog posts over the last two weeks. Chris Hartjes launched a Framework Apocalypse t-shirt, which I would describe as wildly inaccurate, seeing as the zombie frameworks are presented as a unified front, when in actuality they would be bickering among themselves.

teknoid posted a simple way to build a dashboard style page. I had forgotten you could call methods on the models returned by ClassRegistry::init directly, skipping the need to set them to a variable first. Actually I didn't even know this was possible, but I never admit to not knowing things, it makes me look weak and my enemies will use that to crush me.

Mark Story has a really good post on unit testing controllers. Unfortunately testing controllers in CakePHP is a bit of a pain at the moment. It would be awesome if you could use the ClassRegistry::init to create the test controller and that would automatically set up the controller as a test instance. Kind of like how models work now.

In The Groups

The full list of CakePHP 1.2 Final features is listed in the bakery announcement, but I think we can all agree that the #1 most important feature of this release is never having to answer the "Should I use 1.1 or 1.2 for my new project" question in the Google group again. Of course you eliminate one annoying re-occurring question and another pops up. Like this slew of discussions about response time (1, 2, 3).

The first thread linked seems to hit on an issue I've seen before: MediaTemple hates CakePHP. I would take a perfectly fine app and drop it on MediaTemple's GridService and the thing would be unbearably slow. Fortunately I haven't had to deal with MT in awhile, but sc0ttman links to this post, which he claims solves the issue. If I had know about this 6 months ago I'd only be half the alcoholic I am now.

Random Links

I've already commented on this enough, but for those that missed it or just want to relive the "Four reasons to hate CakePHP" fun: go here, then here and finally. In hindsight, I'm starting to think the whole thing was a masterful attempt by A.J. Brown to score some new readers. He probably has a bunch of CakePHP acolytes now waiting for him to even think a bad thought about Cake so they can jump all over him again. Not sure if that counts as a win or not.

According to this poll, CakePHP is the most popular PHP framework. So that means you're currently reading the 47th most popular blog for the #1 most popular framework. You could be doing so much better right now.

I will link to this without comment. You are free to interpret it on your own. If I were to comment, hypotheically, I would probably include a link to this.

In The Bakery

There was one new project in the bakery and I must say it's pretty awesome. It's a flexible revision history behavior. Not to backseat code, but I probably would have gone with one "shadow" table with a text field where you could serialize the model data (and any related models data) to store all the old revisions, rather then a shadow table for each model. Then again, I'd rather remove my fingers bit by bit with a deli slicer then actually write a revision history system, so who am I to judge?

I'm Out!

And on that note don't forget to subscribe to my feed or follow me on twitter. I'm trying to get over 200 RSS subscribers and 50 twitter followers by the end of the year, so if you read this far it must mean you're moderately entertained. PseudoCoder.com: Your source for extremely niche, moderately entertaining reading.™

As always if you think I missed something leave a comment. Or if you do something interesting and want it included in the next digest, send me an email.