III. Development process of a FuelPHP application

The development process of a FuelPHP application generally contains the steps shown in the following image:

• Install FuelPHP: Since we are using this framework, this first step is quite obvious.
• Config (configuration): At the beginning, you will generally need to specify how to connect to the database and which package you will use. Later on, you might also need to create and use your own configuration files to improve the maintainability of your application.
• Scaffold: The oil command line of FuelPHP allows you to easily generate code files ready to be used. This step is not necessary, but we will often use this functionality in this book because it really speeds up the implementation of your application.
• Dev (development): This is where you, as a developer, step in. You customize the generated code to get exactly what you want. When you want to add new features (for instance a new model), you go back to the scaffolding step.
• Tests: Functional and unit testing are important if you want large applications to stay maintainable. When bugs are discovered, you go back to the development step in order to fix them. Unlike the other steps, we won't approach this subject in this chapter for the sake of its conciseness. It will be addressed in Chapter 5, Building Your Own RESTful API.
• Prod (production): Having a project working locally is nice, but the final objective is generally to publish it online. We will give you some directions about this step at the end of this chapter, but we won't get too much into the details, given the diversity of available hosting services.

Just to be clear, this is a very general guideline, and of course the order of the steps is not rigid. For instance, developers using the test-driven development process could merge the fourth and fifth steps, or a preproduction step could be added. The development process should only depend on each developer and institution's standards.

This tutorial contains the first chapter of my book FuelPHP application development blueprints. I released this chapter freely so that you can have an idea of what the book looks like and get a first overview of the FuelPHP framework. Don't hesitate to comment or contact me if you have any question. You can buy the book on the Packt Publishing website, on Amazon, on BN.com and most internet book retailers.