Introduction

Rapid Data Driven Web Applications with CakePHP and PHPReports
By Scott Nesler

In the presentation Scott Nesler will design and develop a web based LUG database to illustrate the CakePHP MVC architecture. The LUG database provide administrative authentication for maintaining SIG information, topics, the presentations of those topics, and a list of attendees to all presentations. The PHPReport XML reporting library will be used to demonstrate a tool for group level web reporting. Overview Requirements - Stan will explain how the LUG groups track topic, event, and attendee information. Defining a Data Model - Scott will explain the database schema he defined to assist Stan in entering and reporting on his LUG data. Creating the Database - There are tools available in assisting in generating database, tables, and fields. Toad and SQLyog are two common MySQL GUI Managers. There is also the good old command line, though you will have to learn a little syntax. Their are plenty of Good MySQL books available. You can also use the MySQL site http://dev.mysql.com/. Web Configuration - CakePHP and PHPReports install easily with Fedora 8. Older distributions require additional XML/XSL plugins to be installed for PHPReports. Baking the Cake - CakePHP provides a command line script which can be used to generate template scaffolding once your database tables have been created. bake.php is run separately for each of the model, controller, and view files. The Frosting - The cake is out of the oven, at this time we will examine the layers, and explain how the frosting was added to the cake for the LUG database. Reporting - A look at the PHPReport php script file and the XML file.