Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP
About this ebook
PHP developers from all skill levels will be able to get value from this book and will be able to transform their spaghetti code applications to clean, modular applications. If you are in the midst of a legacy refactor or you find yourself in a state of despair caused by the code you have inherited, this is the book for you. All you need is to have PHP 5.0 installed, and you're all set to change the way you maintain and deploy your code!
What You Will LearnReplace global and new with dependency injectionExtract SQL statements to gatewaysConvert action logic to controllersRemove repeated logic in page scriptsCreate maintainable PHP code from crufty legacy PHPIn DetailHave you noticed that your legacy PHP application is composed of page scripts placed directly in the document root of the web server? Or, do your page scripts, along with any other classes and functions, combine the concerns of model, view, and controller into the same scope? Is the majority of the logical flow incorporated as include files and global functions rather than class methods? Working with such a legacy application feels like dragging your feet through mud, doesn't it?This book will show you how to modernize your application in terms of practice and technique, rather than in terms of using tools like frameworks and libraries, by extracting and replacing its legacy artifacts. We will use a step-by-step approach, moving slowly and methodically, to improve your application from the ground up. We'll show you how dependency injection can replace both the new and global dependencies. We'll also show you how to change the presentation logic to view files and the action logic to a controller. Moreover, we'll keep your application running the whole time. Each completed step in the process will keep your codebase fully operational with higher quality. When we are done, you will be able to breeze through your code like the wind. Your code will be autoloaded, dependency-injected, unit-tested, layer-separated, and front-controlled. Most of the very limited code we will add to your application is specific to this book. We will be improving ourselves as programmers, as well as improving the quality of our legacy application.
Style and approachThis book gives developers an easy-to-follow, practical and powerful process to bring their applications up to a modern baseline. Each step in the book is practical, self-contained and moves you closer to the end goal you seek: maintainable code. As you follow the exercises in the book, the author almost anticipates your questions and you will have the answers, ready to be implemented on your project.
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About the author
Paul M. Jones is an internationally recognized PHP expert who has worked as everything from junior developer to VP of Engineering in all kinds of organizations (corporate, military, non-profit, educational, medical, and others). He blogs professionally at www.paul-m-jones.com and is a regular speaker at various PHP conferences. Paul's latest open-source project is Aura for PHP. Previously, he was the architect behind the Solar Framework, and was the creator of the Savant template system. He was a founding contributor to the Zend Framework (the DB, DB_Table, and View components), and has written a series of authoritative benchmarks on dynamic framework performance. Paul was one of the first elected members of the PEAR project. He is a voting member of the PHP Framework Interoperability Group, where he shepherded the PSR-1 Coding Standard and PSR-2 Coding Style recommendations, and was the primary author on the PSR-4 Autoloader recommendation. He was also a member of the Zend PHP 5.3 Certification education advisory board. In a previous career, Paul was an operations intelligence specialist for the US Air Force. In his spare time, he enjoys putting.308 holes in targets at 400 yards.
