contents/articles/26.html
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title: "bake.php - Easy baking for lazy folks"
content-type: article
timestamp: 1146922980
tags: "cakephp|frameworks"
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<p>When I first tried Ruby on Rails I was literally amazed by the <em>generator</em> script. Yes, I was young and
inexperienced then (six/seven months ago), but you must admit that getting a controller, a model, all the basic
views generated automatically by</p>
<p><code>rails script/generator scaffold Posts</code></p>
<p>is not a bad thing. Especially if the same script allows you to create model, views and controller separately and
other things. <a href="http://www.symfony-project.com/">Symfony</a> and <span class="caps">PHP</span> on Trax
already tried to port this functionalities, with mixed results. What about Cake? Oh well, yes, we do have something
like that… something rather different, but still something: the <code>bake.php</code> script.<br />
This cute little thing is located in the <code>cake/scripts/</code> folder and can be used – hear, hear
– from command line. You can run Ruby and Perl scripts, so yes, you can actually run <span
class="caps">PHP</span> from command line, although it's not its primary purpose.</p>
<p><img src="/images/pictures/bake.jpg" alt="" /></p>
<p>Cool then, let's open a *nix shell, Windows command prompt, etc. etc., go into the <code>cake/scripts/</code>
folder and run:</p>
<p><code>php bake.php</code></p>
<p>Assuming that the php executable is in your <em><span class="caps">PATH</span></em> environment variable – if
not, either you add it or you'll have to type something like:</p>
<p><code>D:SERVERphpphp.exe bake.php</code></p>
<p>depending on where your php executable is. You'll be be greeted by a “<span class="caps">CAKEPHP</span>
<span class="caps">BAKE</span>” text, and then you'll be asked a few questions. One thing to realize
before proceeding any further: bake.php is <em>not</em> a generator, not in the traditional “Rails”
sense, anyway. It's rather a handy but more verbose dialogue-based configuration script – which will
also generate <em>something</em> eventually if you provide all the necessary details.<br />
A different approach, which may be good or bad according to your taste: personally I think we should also have
something faster to use, like a Rails generator, and I opened a <a
href="https://trac.cakephp.org/ticket/768">ticket</a> about it, but let's see what bake.php can do, for
now.
</p>
<p>The answer is… nearly anything. It annoying enough to please, but if you follow its directions it can do a
prettu decent job in the end, it's far from being sentient, but let's say it's smart enough for a
script. First of all if you try it out on a fresh Cake install it will notice that you haven't configured your
database yet, so it will ask for a hostname, username, password, database name etc. etc. and generate your
<code>app/config/database.php</code> for you, not a bad start.
</p>
<p>Once that's done – and it won't go on unless you configure a (MySQL only?) database – you can
proceed with the rest. You can start creating either a controller, model or view; I tried a <code>Posts</code>
controller, for example. The script then asks quite a few questions:</p>
<ul>
<li>The controller's name</li>
<li>Whether it will use other models besides posts</li>
<li>Whether you want to include any helper</li>
<li>Whether you want to include any component</li>
<li>Whether you want to generate the base <span class="caps">CRUD</span> methods</li>
</ul>
<p>Then finally it generates the damn thing. The result is good enough:</p>
<p><small><br />
<pre><code>
<?php
class PostsController extends AppController
{
//var $scaffold;
var $name = 'Posts';</p>
<p>function index()<br />
{<br />
$this→set(‘data', $this→Post→findAll());<br />
}</p>
<p>function add()<br />
{<br />
if(empty($this→params[‘data']))<br />
{<br />
$this→render();<br />
}<br />
else<br />
{<br />
if($this→Post→save($this→params[‘data']))<br />
{<br />
$this→flash(‘Post saved.', ‘/posts/index');<br />
}<br />
else<br />
{<br />
$this→render();<br />
}<br />
}<br />
}</p>
<p>function edit($id)<br />
{<br />
if(empty($this→params[‘data']))<br />
{<br />
$this→set(‘data', $this→Post→find(‘Post.id = ' . $id));<br />
}<br />
else<br />
{<br />
if($this→Post→save($this→params['data']))<br />
{<br />
$this→flash(‘Post saved.', ‘/posts/index');<br />
}<br />
else<br />
{<br />
$this→set(‘data', $this→params[‘data']);<br />
$this→validateErrors($this→Post);<br />
$this→render();<br />
}<br />
}<br />
}</p>
<p>function view($id)<br />
{<br />
$this→set(‘data', $this→Post→find('Post.id = ' . $id));<br />
}</p>
<p>function delete($id)<br />
{<br />
$this→Post→del($id);<br />
$this→redirect(‘/posts/index');<br />
}</p>
<p>function postList()<br />
{<br />
$vars = $this→Post→findAll();<br />
foreach($vars as $var)<br />
{<br />
$list[$var[‘Post'][‘id']] = $var[‘Post'][‘name'];<br />
}</p>
<p>return $list;<br />
}<br />
}<br />
?><br />
</code></pre><br />
</small></p>
<p>It's more or less the same with models and views: it will still ask a lot of questions and in the end generate
the thing. <br />
This behaviour is more advanced than a standard generator, you can include helpers and components already, if you
want, but do you <em>really</em> want that? For models it even asks if you want to include particular associations
and validation rules! Personally, I'd rather a generator script which generates something <em>immediately</em>
and accepts maybe some parameters to further customization, like:</p>
<p><code>php bake.php scaffold Posts</code><br />
<code>php bake.php controller Posts</code><br />
<code>php bake.php model Posts</code><br />
<code>php bake.php model Posts</code><br />
<code>php bake.php controller Posts helper +Html -Time,Javascript</code><br />
<code>php bake.php model Posts assoc +hasMany comments,tags</code>
</p>
<p>Bah… just some random thoughts. How about custom-made generators (<a
href="http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/AvailableGenerators">Rails-inspired</a>)?</p>
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