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