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

A Single Location for Classes


Before we implement a PSR-0 autoloader, we need to pick a directory location in the codebase to hold every class that will ever be used in the codebase. Some projects already have such a location; it may be called includes, classes, src, lib or something similar.

If a location like that already exists, examine it carefully. Does it have only class files in it, or is it a combination of class files and other kinds of files? If it has anything besides class files in it, or if no such location exists, create a new directory location and call it classes (or some other properly descriptive name).

This directory will be the central location for all classes used throughout the project. Later, we will begin moving classes from their scattered locations in the project to this central location.

Add Autoloader Code

Once we have a central directory location for our class files, we need to set up an autoloader to look in that location for classes. We can create the autoloader...