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PHP Standards and Best Practices

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Creating Components

2:26 with Phil Sturgeon

Now that we know how Composer works, we can look into how packages are distributed and how you can package up your code to be used by other developers.

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    [MUSIC] 0:00
    So far in this course we've been building really simple applications. 0:04
    They all have an index.php and run in the browser. 0:08
    A component, sometimes called a package interchangeably, 0:10
    does not run in the browser, but is used by an application or another component. 0:13
    That means we need to approach them slightly differently, but 0:17
    they're still quite similar. 0:19
    Let's have a go at making a really basic component with a simple structure. 0:21
    Then we can look at how we write classes and 0:24
    how we check to see if they work when we build them. 0:26
    First, we'll need an SRC folder, which is where all of our code will live. 0:29
    Inside there we're going to create a single class called Example.php. 0:35
    This is a drastically simplified version of a component, and 0:40
    your component will probably have a lot more classes to it. 0:42
    But, for the sake of simplicity, we're just gonna have the one. 0:45
    Let's throw some code in here. 0:48
    And save that out. 0:49
    Here we're putting our code inside a namespace, Treehouse/Example. 0:51
    And inside here we're defining a class also called Example. 0:56
    This repetition is quite common. 1:01
    Many packages will have one main class to interact with. 1:02
    And this can be the same name as the component itself. 1:05
    Finally on line seven we're defining a method named getSomething. 1:08
    And we're just returning a static string for the sake of simplicity at this point. 1:12
    So far we've been checking our code works by running it in the browser. 1:17
    Unlike with an application we don't have an index.php for this component. 1:20
    And to be honest we don't want or need one. 1:24
    It would be much more useful if we used unit tests instead of hacking together 1:26
    some browser code and manually checking things work okay. 1:29
    Unit testing is a huge subject which is covered well by other courses. 1:32
    But we can certainly cover the basics here. 1:35
    First let's install php unit as a dev dependency. 1:37
    Once again, we can use composer require phpunit, 1:40
    which is the name of the vendor, and the name of the package itself. 1:44
    And then because this is a dev dependency, remember we don't wanna have to 1:49
    force people to install phpunit on their production service. 1:52
    We're gonna run --dev and the version constraint is 4.2.wild card because I 1:55
    know that 4.2, at the moment, is the latest version. 2:00
    So there we can see it's created a composer.json for us and 2:04
    it's installed all of php units dependencies itself and php unit 4.2.5. 2:08
    Perfect. 2:13
    At this point we have the very early stages of a composer package. 2:15
    If we're going to think about releasing this code, 2:18
    there are a few other things we should think about first. 2:20
    Next, let's look at some standards to improve the quality of our code. 2:23

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