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

Review and next steps


At this point we have extracted the core of our legacy codebase, the domain logic that sits at the center our application, to its own separate and testable layer. This has been the most demanding of the steps in our modernization process, but it has been very much worth our time. We have not made many modifications or improvements to the domain logic itself. Any changes we have made have been just enough to get data into our new Transactions classes and then out again for later use.

In a lot of ways, all we have done is shuffle the logic around so that it is independently addressable. Although the domain logic itself may still have many problems, those problems are now testable problems. We can continue adding tests as needed to explore edge cases in our domain logic. If we need to add new domain logic, we can create or modify our Transactions classes and methods to encapsulate and test that logic.

The process of extracting domain logic to its own layer leaves us with...