I thought it would be fun to take an old project and go through the process of refactoring it.
So I picked one of the fist projects I ever did, a simple script for my dad's construction company. It was designed to help track projects that had been sent out to sub-contractors for bid. This is a slightly modified version of the original codebase, as I needed to remove any private information. I felt it important to leave it as untouched as possible, to show just how bad it was.
I wanted to take this old piece of junk, and step by step turn it into something respectable. Along the way I hope to learn a thing or two.
- Fixed a problem I've been meaning to solve for a while now in that I had hardcoded values for the database connection and I wanted to get away from that and start using enviornment variables. Pulled in the dotenv package and updated Phinx and Codeception to use it, as well as the App\Database in the container. Also pulled in an auth package I'm going to start playing with for a login system.
- Back at it again. Made a few tweaks to the readme. Began the process of redesigning the site using bootstrap.
- I've created a number of model objects to move the database logic out of the controllers themselves an into dedicated classes.
- I've gone ahead and pulled in league/route to help finish up the transition to MVC. I don't like how league/route requires a $request and $response object in every contoller method however, so I've written my own custom strategy to only inject the $request object if I ask for it (add at at the first paramater in a method) and I've created a base controller that will resolve the $response object out of the container (league/container is included with league/route). The base controller also resolves the template engine (league/plates) and my Database object (my PDO helper) out of the container as well. This will give me access to everything I need and I feel helps clean up the list of attributes on each method.
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I've done a lot of work updating the database relationships, however in the process I've created a (bigger) mess of my (honestly) already messy test suite. Before I continue on I want to pause to clean up and refactor the test suite itself. As well, I want to pull in fzaninotto/faker and create some seed data.
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Happier with my test suite then I was yesterday. I still have more work to do on the database side, but I wanted to take a break from that and work on seperating my html templates from my php code. This will be my first step in refactoring to a more MVC architecture. I'm pulling in league/plates to help with this.
- I'm really starting to appreciate my test suite with this recent series of refactoring. I'm modifying tables and columns in the database and without being able to run my test after every change and get immediate feedback on what broke and where I'd be trying to finde a needle in a haystack.
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Finished the previous mentioned refactoring and cleanup. Added some new tests along the way as I discovered additional behvior in the app.
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The next thing I'll be working on is the database. There are a number of areas where one table is referencing another table by something like company name, as opposed to a foreign key, and there are no constraints on the table to prevent duplicate company names. To prevent unexpected behavior, I'll be refactoring to use foreign keys.
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In order to help me get the ball rolling on refactoring the database I decided to pull in robmorgan/phinx so I could take advantage of database migrations. The first step here was to recreate the current tables (as is).
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Finished removing depricated mysql extensions.
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Going to start working on general refactoring; removing undeeded temporary variables, dry up code where possible, etc.
- The script is using php's depricated mysql library. The next major change will be switching that over to PDO. I've setup an App\Database helper class as a wrapper around a PDO object that I'll be using.
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Having all the files in the root directory is making my eye twitch so I moved files into public/, public/includes, and public/images directories.
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The next thing I want to improve is readability. I'll be going through all the files fixing the spacing/indentation and converting tabs to spaces.
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So this is among one of the first things I ever built. It was before I had any idea what I was doing. Before I had even decided I wanted to do web development as a career. Half the code is random stuff found on the internet and slightly modified to "work." As such you'll see variable names that make no sense, weird indentation, and all kinds of head scratchers. Super fun!
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After a quick look around, refamiliarizing myself on exactly what this thing was suppose to do, I've decided my first objective is to write some really simple tests to document the basic behavior. I've got so many things to tackle that I'd like at least some security going forward that this thing still works. Who knows what change will be the dominio to make them all fall?