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

Consolidate Class Files


First, we will consolidate all the application classes to our central directory location as determined in the previous chapter. Doing so will put them where our autoloader can find them. Here is the general process we will follow:

  1. Find an include statement that pulls in a class definition file.

  2. Move that class definition file to our central class directory location, making sure that it is placed in a sub-path matching the PSR-0 rules.

  3. In the original file and in all other files in the codebase where an include pulls in that class definition, remove that include statement.

  4. Spot check to make sure that all the files now autoload that class by browsing to them or otherwise running them.

  5. Commit, push, and notify QA.

  6. Repeat until there are no more include calls that pull in class definitions.

For our examples, we will assume we have a legacy application with this partial file system layout:

/path/to/app/
classes/          # our central class directory location
Mlaphp/
Autoloader...