CakePHP 3.0.0 dev preview 2 released
The CakePHP core team is very excited to announce the second development preview of CakePHP 3.0
The CakePHP core team is excited to announce the second development preview of CakePHP 3.0.0[1]. In the few months since 3.0.0-dev1, we’ve been hard at work incorporating community feedback on the ORM, and building out some of the functionality that was missing in the first development preview.
New features in 3.0.0-dev2
- CakePHP has adopted the PSR-4 autoloader standard. If you are updating, make sure you update composer as well using ` composerself- update`.
- The directory structure of both CakePHP and the App skeleton has been simplified a bit thanks to PSR-4.
- The AclComponent has been removed - It will be returning as a plugin.
- The TestShell, and webrunner have been removed in favor of only supporting phpunit from the CLI, and VisualPHPUnit.
- View templates have been moved from View/ to Template/. This was done so the View/ directory would only contain view classes and helpers.
- The HtmlHelper, FormHelper, and SessionHelper use string templates consistently.
- ID attributes are now always generated with ` -` instead of CamelCase. This was done to standardize on one convention for CSS selectors.
- API documentation and the cookbook have had many new sections and improvements.
- Scaffold has been removed. Improved dynamic scaffolding is now available through the CRUD plugin[2] which is already compatible with 3.0 and takes away much of the repetitive tasks done in controllers.
- The UpgradeShell has been moved into a separate plugin.
- Better debugging output for some complex objects like Entities, Tables and Queries. Also added a special method to control what data is outputed for objects when using the debug() function
- Added Collection::insert()
FormHelper
FormHelper has been re-built from the ground up. It features a new extensible widget system. Form widgets allow you to build self contained input widgets. This makes it easy to define complex widgets like the datetime widget in application or plugin code. Once created, widgets can be combined with other FormHelper features like ` input()`.
FormHelper also works with the new ORM now. You can create forms for individual entities, or collections of entities:
`
//Createaformforasingleentity&itsassociations
echo$this->Form->create($article);
//Createaformformultipleentities&theirassociations.
echo$this->Form->create($articles);
`
FormHelper also features a pluggable context system that allows you to integrate FormHelper with any ORM you may wish to use.
TranslateBehavior
TranslateBehavior has been re-built from the ground up. It features the long awaited ability to translate all models including associations from a find(). The new ` TranslateTrait` makes dealing with multiple translations in your entities simple as well.
ORM improvements
We’ve continued to build out capabilities in the ORM. Some notable improvements in dev2 were:
- Composite primary key support - The ORM now supports composite primary keys in all associations.
- The Model.beforefind event is now triggered for all associations in the same query.
- Eager loading is now separate from the Query class. This makes implementing custom eager loading much easier.
- Model/Repository was renamed to Model/Table. Several people found ‘Repository’ to be a confusing and alien term.
- Interfaces have been extracted to reduce the reliance on concrete implementations.
- The formatResults() method has been added to provide many of the features that afterFind() used to do.
- Query::counter() was added to provide support for complex count logic. This makes it easier to override the count in the PaginatorComponent.
- Table::patchEntity() was added, it enables you to merge requet form data into an existing entity and its associations.
Up next
Our next release will be yet another development preview. In the dev3 release we are going to focus on updating:
- Bake and all the related tasks need to be updated to work with the new ORM.
- Update the i18n extract task to extract validation messages from Table objects
- Add support for SQLServer. With the database layer reasonably stable adding SQLServer will help developers on windows.
For more details on all the changes in 3.0.0, you can consult the migration guide[2]. 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.