Book Image

Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP

By : Paul Jones
Book Image

Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP

By: Paul Jones

Overview of this book

Have 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 such as 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.
Table of Contents (35 chapters)
Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgement
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Typical Legacy Page Script
Code before Gateways
Code after Gateways
Code after Transaction Scripts
Code before Collecting Presentation Logic
Code after Collecting Presentation Logic
Code after Response View File
Code after Controller Rearrangement
Code after Controller Extraction
Code after Controller Dependency Injection
Index

Test suite


As this is a bookprerequisites:test suite" about legacy applications, it would be the height of optimism to expect that the codebase has a suite of unit tests. Most legacy applications, especially include-oriented, page-based applications, are highly resistant to unit tests. There are no units to test, only a spaghetti mess of tightly coupled functionality.

And yet it is possible to test a legacy application. The key here is not to test what the system units ought to do, but what the system as a whole already does. The criteria for a successful test is that the system generates the same output after a change as it did before that change. This kind of test is called a characterization test.

It is not in the scope of this book to discuss how to write a characterization test suite. There are some good tools out there already for writing these kinds of tests, such as Selenium and Codeception. Having tests of this sort before we go about refactoring the codebase is invaluable. We will...