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Getting Started with Lithium

h3rald@h3rald.com — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 08:48:00 -0600

So Lithium is now officially out, and its 0.1 release can be freely downloaded from the official web site or by cloning the Lithium git repository. The good news is that although not many web hosts offer PHP 5.3, you can try it out youself, locally and with minimum effort.

Requirements

According to the Lithium Wiki, to develop applications with Lithium you need:

A web server, like Apache or IIS
PHP 5.3.0 or higher
Git (not required, but all example projects are on git repos, so you may as well have it)

For this tutorial, more specifically, you need to download (just download, don’t install anything!):

mongoose, a tiny, standalone (as in one single file), cross-platform web server.
PHP 5.3.0, not the installer, the zip package.
Lithium (version 0.1, at the time of writing)
The li3_docs plugin.

To get the li3_docs plugin you need to register on rad-dev.org, and clone the li3_docs git repository. If you don’t have git installed or you don’t want to read another awesome tutorial to install it and learn how to use it, I’ll save you the hassle and let you download the plugin from here, for this time ony.

Note: This tutorial assumes that you are on Windows. If you are not, some things may be a bit different depending on your platform.

Setting up the environment

Choose a directory on your sistem (let’s call it D:\lithium_test from now on). We’ll do everything in here, and you can move it anywhere you like afterwards, even on a USB stick, without breaking anything.

Unzip Lithium in D:\lithium_test, so that it contains the following files and directories:
- app/
- libraries/
- .htaccess (it won’t actually be used in this tutorial)
Unzip PHP 5.3.0 somewhere and copy the following files to the D:\lithium_test folder:
- php5.dll
- php-cgi.exe
- php.ini (just get php.ini-development from the PHP package and rename it)
Copy the mongoose-2.8.exe executable in D:\lithium_test and rename it to mongoose.exe for convenience.
Create a mongoose.conf file containing the following lines:

1cgi_interp      php-cgi.exe
2cgi_ext         php

If you did everything correctly, your D:\lithium_test directory should contain the following:

app\
libraries\
.htaccess
mongoose.exe
mongoose.conf
php-cgi.exe
php.ini
php5.dll

Running Lithium

Double click mongoose.exe and point your browser of choice to http://localhost:8080/app/webroot/index.php. You should see the Lithium temporary homepage (yes, I expected something fancier too):

Now, let’s see if we can get the li3_docs plugin running as well:

Unzip li3_docs.zip and copy the li3_docs folder in D:\lithium_test\app\libraries\plugins.
Open D:\lithium_test\app\config\bootstrap.php and add the line: Libraries::add('plugin', 'li3_docs'); at the end. I actually found this commented out already (line 80).

Go to http://localhost:8080/app/webroot/index.php?url=docs, you should see something like this:

Congratulation, you’re now running your first Lithium application!

Fixing URLs

Once the initial excitement wears off you’ll notice that none of the links on the docs page works.

That’s because the mongoose web server does not support URL rewriting (and Lithium needs it badly right now), so we have to change the way URLs are created. @nateabele gave me some tips on how to do this; it’s very simple:

Create a directory called action in D:\lithium_test\app\extensions.
Create a file called Request.php, containing the following:

 1<?php
 2namespace app\extensions\action;
 3
 4class Request extends \lithium\action\Request {
 5
 6  protected function _base() {
 7    return  '?url=';
 8  }
 9}
10?>

We’re basically extending the \lithium\action\Request with a custom class, telling Lithium how to create the base URL.

After doing so, open D:\lithium_test\app\webroot\index.php and change:

echo lithium\action\Dispatcher::run();

into:

echo lithium\action\Dispatcher::run(new app\extensions\action\Request());

In this case, we’re instructing the dispatcher to use our custom Request class instead of the default one.

Now everything should work as expected. Reload the docs page (http://localhost:8080/app/webroot/index.php?url=docs) and verify that the links work by navigating to Lithium, then action and finally Controller.

Now you can use Lithium to display its own API locally (if things didn’t work out, there’s always http://li3.rad-dev.org/docs).

The CakePHP Framework: Your First Bite

h3rald@h3rald.com — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 20:03:00 -0600

According to a recent study, PHP is one of the most popular programming languages in the world. In spite of this, PHP is often criticized for its inconsistent naming conventions, its lack of important features as compared to other languages (like namespaces) and its inherent disorganization. Furthermore, PHP is very easy to learn, and this has often led to the common misconception that most PHP developers are inexperienced and that their code is therefore prone to security vulnerabilities and exploits.Read the full article on SitePoint.com

Ruby on Rails & CakePHP

h3rald@h3rald.com — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 01:52:28 -0600

This article is an attempt to port a famous Ruby on Rails tutorial to PHP using an emerging PHP MVC framework, CakePHP. CakePHP was inspired by Rails’ philosophy of Rapid Application Development. It implements a lot of the features and concepts that made Ruby on Rails popular in a very short time. Although Ruby’s syntax and way of doing things is known to be much more elegant than other programming languages, there is yet hope for PHP to get more organized and effi cient. This tutorial will follow its Rails counterpart step-by-step, covering the essential steps to create a simple, yet fully functional, web application.
Register on the International PHP Magazine to read the full article.

An overview of the CakePHP framework

h3rald@h3rald.com — Tue, 30 May 2006 07:50:20 -0600

“There are many frameworks available for the PHP programming language nowadays, and especially a lot of RAD (Rapid Application Development) frameworks which aim to make web development faster, less tedious and more organized. CakePHP was one of the first frameworks to port the RAD philosophy – which became so popular after Ruby on Rails – to the PHP programming language. CakePHP v1.0 is now one of the most popular and intuitive solutions for PHP programming, let’s discover why…”

Read the full article on php|architect article repository

Watch out: CakePHP screencasts

h3rald@h3rald.com — Sat, 20 May 2006 07:47:00 -0600

Tutorials are great, articles are helpful, manuals are essential and the API is your best friend, but there’s still something missing there… Unfortunately podcasts are not yet available, but the CakePHP team is proud to announce the creation of two screencasts in an effort to help new bakers familiarizing with CakePHP’s concepts.
This is old news now, the screencasts section came together with the site overhaul but I only got a chance to take a look at them (one of them only, to be totally honest) recently, and so here’s a spoil… erhm, a detailed description of John Anderson’s screencast about the Blog Tutorial.

There’s something I’ll never do: a screencast. Recording every mouse movement, every word or piece of code typed in half an hour? No way! And what happens if I mistype something? People will keep pointing out the fact that I was starting to type </h2> to close a </h1> tag, or that I waited an eternity like five full seconds before deciding what to do. I guess I’m quite paranoid… John did it, and he did it well. Using just bash, vim and Safari he was able to record an excellent 30-minutes screencast featuring the blog tutorial.
Before people start complaining that the blog tutorial should be completed in fifteen minutes, keep in mind that John’s screencast is meant to show everything clearly to new users, via a trial and error approach if necessary.

Here’s what happens in the screencast, nothing new if your read the blog tutorial, but still interesting, especially if you’re new to Cake. Unfortunately there’s no audio, but the video talks by itself and John will occasionally write some comments here and there.

0:01 – 5:00

SVN checkout to get the latest CakePHP version
make app/tmp writeable
execute queries (table posts)
insert some test posts
create database config file: modify 3 lines of database.php
CakePHP is now able to connect to database
create app/models/post.php model
create posts_controller.php [John uses Vim as preferred PHP editor]
try to access /posts/, error: missing method index()
create function index() in postscontroller.php able to fetch posts
refresh, missing index view
create index.thtml displaying the raw posts array

5:01 – 10:00

index.thtml: display posts with table and foreach iteration
add hyperlink in index.thtml to view posts
access /posts/view/1 → missing method view()
add view() method in postscontroller.php
create view.thtml to display
Raw view post with pre tags and print_r()

10:01 – 15:00

display post properly with <p> tags
add link in index.thtml to add a post
missing method → add()
add add() in controller
missing view [trial and error, trial and error…]
create add.thtml, using the Html Helper to create input tags easily

15:01 – 20:00

add.thtml (continued)
testing add form
view added post
start adding another (for validation purposes) [stop before submitting]
modify post.php model, valid_not_empty for title and body
modify view to trigger validation $html->tagErrorMsg()
test: no body, message displayed
test: no title, message displayed
add another post, everything works
[pause: five seconds]
back to the controller, create delete() function

20:01 – 25:00

delete function (continued)
add “Actions” table column in index.thtml, with link delete post
delete two posts
take a breath
add link in index.thtml to edit post
refresh page, mouse over edit links…
back to controller, add edit function [we learnt abour CakePHP errors alright]

25:01 – 27:38

pause, 5 sec [should I write edit.thtml from scratch]
copy add.thtml as edit.thtml
change just the title and form action
[pause: 3 sec]
test edit link
edit a post
move around, switch views
edit config/routes.php
set default route to posts/index
refresh – all done!

That’s it. All in a 40MB .mov file. Download it from here.