http://refactored.siradrian.com refactoring the development process Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:28:46 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Over the past few months I've been working on a large application powered by my vBulletin MVC framework which required me to make several improvements. One of the models I was working with had about 40 fields, and that caused me to generate all the forms dynamically from model ... http://refactored.siradrian.com/2008/03/26/framework-update/ I have uploaded the latest and greatest copy of the CodeIgniter - vBulletin user integration.  You can find it in SVN, or download it from SourceForge. http://refactored.siradrian.com/2008/02/21/codeigniter-integration/ My development tools are now being made public! I am moving it all into one project at SourceForge where there will be guest downloads, and SVN access. Only myself and a few other developers will have write access. I am hoping that pushing it all into open ... http://refactored.siradrian.com/2008/02/20/public-development-tools/ Unit testing is a very powerful form of debugging which many developers don't know about. Once your applications get bigger, it is daunting to make any changes in fear of breaking the entire application. Re-testing the entire application as a whole is both silly and time consuming. ... http://refactored.siradrian.com/2008/02/19/unit-testing-introduction/ After doing various unit testing for VDE, I've encountered a quite annoying flaw with PHP unit testing in general. You can't test private or protected functions, since they are being called publicly from the test function. Since in most cases you are testing a class file with only classes in ... http://refactored.siradrian.com/2008/02/17/unit-testing-private-code/ A few of my friends have asked me about this recently, so I'll document it here for others as well. Visibility refers to how an object property or method can be seen or called. The simplest type, and the default (making it the most common) is public. A public visibility ... http://refactored.siradrian.com/2008/02/17/visibility/ With vBulletin 4.0 blindly around the corner, where does that leave developers? If we start something big, by the time it is ready, it'll be about time to rewrite the whole thing. Or, if we're lucky, it will work for a short while, but we'll have to recode ... http://refactored.siradrian.com/2008/02/16/futureproofing-long-term-projects/ Over the past 6 to 12 months I've also been creating a MVC framework for vBulletin. I originally based it off the structure of cakePHP, but slowly altered it to suit my needs more, and also to match how vBulletin works more. If you are new to MVC, the general ... http://refactored.siradrian.com/2008/02/16/vbulletin-mvc-framework/ The biggest time waster with writing vBulletin mods is working with the product system. To save templates you have to copy-paste and go between several windows. To do anything you have to use their awkward web interfaces. Last year I toyed with the idea of importing all the product data from ... http://refactored.siradrian.com/2008/02/16/vbulletin-development-environment/