January 05, 2014

CakePHP 3.0.0 dev preview 1 released

The CakePHP core team is very excited to announce the first development preview of CakePHP 3.0

The CakePHP core team is very excited to announce the first development preview of CakePHP 3.0[1]. The team has been hard at work for the while, and we’re very excited and pleased with the progress we’ve made so far. Our goal with development preview releases like this is to gather early feedback about the changes coming in CakePHP 3.0. While a number of things will be changing in CakePHP 3.0, our focus for this release has been the ORM.

The Model layer in CakePHP has served the community very well for the past 8 years, but it has started to show its age. One of the goals of CakePHP 3.0 is to replace the ageing ORM with a more modern object- orientated implementation. This development preview has the underpinnings of the new ORM. The ORM has many of the features/methods you can expect in future 3.0 release, albeit with a few rough spots.

CakePHP 3.0 represents a significant break in backwards compatibility. One of the largest the project has ever had. We’re trying to modify existing methods and classes only where it’s required. However, modernizing the ORM has caused a significant ripple effect to other parts of the framework. You can expect fairly significant changes in everything that touches the ORM/Models as we’ve started over and built what we will become a great ORM.

Still a preview

We’d like to remind you that this is a development preview release. Many features are incomplete or missing. For example, the TreeBehavior and TranslateBehavior do not yet have 3.x versions. This release is not intended for production use, and should be considered alpha software. We are hoping that by releasing preview releases we can get feedback from you - the community - about CakePHP 3.0. The following features are known to be incomplete or broken. We will not be accepting any bug reports on these features at this time:

  • Console/cake bake does not work at this time.
  • FormHelper does not work with the new ORM yet.
  • SchemaShell has been removed.
  • Scaffold has been removed.
  • Many behaviors have been removed or are not working.
  • AclComponent is not working with DbAcl.

In addition to incomplete subsystems, many subsystems have had breaking API changes made to them. We recommend you checkout the migration guide[2] for more detail on which methods/classes have been changed.

Other improvements

In addition to the ORM we’ve improved other parts of the framework. A short list of improvements you an expect are:

  • Reverse routing has almost consistent time complexity now. In previous releases reverse routing performance decreased as the number of routes increased. Thanks to named routes and some additional optimizations routing performance should stay more consistent even with large numbers of routes.
  • Routing prefixes now map to controllers in sub-namespaces and not prefixed methods.
  • New HTTP client. The HttpSocket class has been entirely re-written. It is now simpler, more performant and easier to use.
  • Simplified configuration. While CakePHP does not have much configuration required. The configuration it does have is now much simpler and more transparent than ever before.
  • Community standards adopted. CakePHP is leveraging PSR-0, PSR-1 and composer support.
  • Streamlined events system. The events system is now simpler and more efficient than ever before.

Getting started

On top of the framework changes, we’ve created a new repository for the application skeleton[3]. You can install this and the development preview of CakePHP using composer[4]. After downloading and installing composer you can use:

$ php composer.phar create-project -s dev cakephp/app

This will generate a new application, so you can start experimenting with CakePHP 3.0.

Documentation online

While this is a preview release, we have been busy building documentation alongside the code changes. The in-development book[5] and API[6] are already online. They will be receiving frequent updates as more documentation and examples are written.

Getting involved

If you’re as excited about CakePHP 3.0 as we are, there are many ways you can get involved. You could help with the open issues in github[7], or provide your thoughts on any of the open RFC/Enhancement tickets. Both of these help us design and build the best framework we can. If you’re reading through the documentation and notice an error, please let us know, either by opening an issue or sending a pull request.

I’d like to thank everyone who has contributed thoughts, code, documentation or feedback to 3.0 so far. It’s going to be a major milestone for the project, and we’re just getting started with making it the best version of CakePHP ever.

Posted by markstory
Filed under: news
Tags: release, CakePHP, News