With jQuery & CakePHP to World Domination

CakeFest Orlando 2008 With jQuery & CakePHP to World Domination by Felix Geisendörfer

About me • Felix Geisendörfer, 20 years old, Germany • Blogger / Programmer / Entrepreneur • Used jQuery & CakePHP in all battle ﬁelds • School projects, small business sites, 300++ DB table monster project

Blog about CakePHP ThinkingPHP.org

Deep inside the CakePHP core ThinkingPHP.org

Deep inside the CakePHP core Sometimes things just go wrong ThinkingPHP.org

World Domination

Many empires tried to achieve it

World Domination Mauryan Empire Persian Empire Soviet Union Mongol Empire Macedonian Empire Roman Empire Nazi Germany Ming Empire Portuguese empire Arab Caliphate French Empire Spanish Empire Habsburg Empire Japanese Empire British Empire American Empire

World Domination Mauryan Empire Persian Empire Soviet Union & is Mongol Empire Roman Empire ut Macedonian Empire r N or Caliphate p N Arab Nazi Germany h Empire Ming Empire Portuguese empire P ck French Spanish Empire u Habsburg Empire hEmpire C Japanese British Empire American Empire

CakePHP & jQuery

Quick battle analysis

The problems • No jQuery JS helper available • No manual on using jQuery + CakePHP • No jQuery / CakePHP framework (except Jamal)

Why jQuery? • Embraces succinct code • Huge number of plugins out there • Plays nice with other libraries

Why CakePHP? just kidding ...

Why CakePHP? ... well actually

Jaxer: The new guy in town • Write entire web applications in JavaScript • MySQL, SQLite, SMTP, File system access • Server process stays alive

Jaxer: Why not? • No Linux version yet Jaxer also works with (Cake)PHP • Might not scale • No Framework yet

So let’s take over the world ...

Getting your JS included Controller (app/controllers/posts_controller.php) The Q uick & View (app/views/posts/index.ctp) Easy Layout (app/views/layouts/default.ctp)

Problems you’ll run into

Not DRY

Confusing wh at d o es ? e e r e fro m w h m F, T de c o W lu i nc

How to KISS this? • Have a central place to deﬁne JS includes • Only one reference to each JS ﬁle • Simple rules for inclusion on a per action basis

Rule based JS inclusion app/conﬁg/js_includes.php (custom approach, not in cake core!)

The inclusion rule parser ib le Fl ex T he (Google “33 Lines of Magic Code”) Will talk about this in tomorrows talks

Automatic JS inclusion • If “app/webroot/js/views/layouts/{layout}.js” exists -> load it • If “app/webroot/js/views/{controller}/{view}.js” exists -> load it

Getting controller data to JS Yummy function for your AppController

Getting controller data to JS How to make a list of $posts available in JS

Getting controller data to JS (put this in your layouts <head> section) How to export your $jsonVars array to JavaScript

Getting controller data to JS How to access jsonVars in JavaScript

World Domination

PostTask.com • Personal time management • Next step: Becoming the best project management tool • After that: World Domination l Break e rcia Co mm

jayDom Microformats on steriods

MVC concept HTML / DOM Model CSS View JavaScript Controller

Ask audience Microformats who has heard about Microformat • A collection of standardized HTML snippets • Can be parsed by spiders, making your site semantic in a way thats actually useful • Examples: hCard, rel-license, adr, geo ...

jayDom Microformats • Usually non-standardized formats, custom to your application • Can change as your app evolves • You are already using them

jayDom Microformat Example

jayDom Microformat Example Task.id Task.date

jayDom Microformat Example Task.name Task.progress Task.time_done Task.time_total

Microformat I/O • In order to read data from our microformat, we need to parse it • If we want to update our data we also need to be able to write to the microformat

Reading Microformat data Microformat snippet we are interested in Task.progress Ask: Anybody who doesn’t know regex? How to parse the encoded progress value

Writing Microformat data Microformat snippet we are interested in How to encode progress value of “75”

jayDom way of semantic encoding Get: ea ts B Set: ea ts B

Mapping DOM accessors Get: Set:

A real world example

jayDom Microformat Example Task.id

jayDom Microformat Example Task.id Task.date

jayDom Microformat Example Task.progress

jayDom Microformat Example Task.progress Task.time_done

jayDom Microformat Example Task.progress Task.time_done Task.time_total

jayDom Microformat Example Task.name Task.progress Task.time_done Task.time_total

World Domination

jQuery Selectors on steriods Select all tasks with the name ‘New Task’ Select all tasks that are more then half done

jQuery Selectors on steriods • Find all Posts • That have at least one Comment written by Felix • Only return posts that visible (not hidden)

Easy Ajax

jayDom Advantages • Put your semantics to use • Save tons of bandwidth on server calls using JSON • Hassle-less client server communication

Questions • Thanks for listening • Thanks for helping the CakePHP project grow Slides will be available on ThinkingPHP.org shortly!

With jQuery & CakePHP to World Domination

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Notes on slide 1

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