Well, unless the plans have changed Cake2 is targeted for PHP 5.2.x (see the announcement of cake2-dev). While it will work on PHP 5.3, it can’t use any of the new features available in PHP 5.3…

And this leads to the same “problem” we have today with CakePHP’s PHP4-compatibility: it limits the possibilities of what the framework devs can accomplish. I don’t know how often I wished the devs would have used PHP5 features like interfaces and abstract classes. It would have made my life much easier. And I think the same is true for PHP 5.3: you will wish the framework devs would have used some of its features.

I hope this explains what the problem is ;-)

Well, I probably have to disappoint you… I’m no longer using CakePHP very often, so there isn’t much to write about. Plus CakePHP feels “dated” to me with no PHP5.3 version on the horizon…

Anyway, I hope to get back to blog more regularly, I have become too lazy on the blogging front ;-)

Just read this post, almost 2.5 years after you wrote it, and it is still totally relevant and forward thinking.

Hopefully soon you’ll consider blogging again on a regular basis about cakephp.

All the best.

According to CakePHP’s roadmap lazy loading of helpers (and models & components) is planned for CakePHP 2.0, though I don’t know how they intend to implement it.

so did someone already open a ticket for this nice and clean idea to load helpers where they are needed (lazy) instead of loading them far away in the controller methods?

for backwords comp. you could just “enhance” the current view – loading all controller helpers + the ability to load the rest via
$this->loadHelpers(‘MyHelper’);
and
$this->loadHelpers(array(‘MyHelper’, …));

currently loadHelpers() does not seem to be used in that way.

Yes, you can do it in that way and it is probably a better solution than what I have shown (though in View::_loadHelpers(), called by loadHelpers(), there is also a check to prevent loading the same helper twice).

function get__($property) {
     if(!property_exists($this, $property)) {
        $this->loadHelpers(array($property));
     }
     return $this->{$property};
}

would be slightly better, no? I’m a little bit new at PHP OOP, so forgive me if I’m wrong.

public function _render($___viewFn, $___dataForView, $loadHelpers = true, $cached = false) {
    parent::_render($___viewFn, $___dataForView, $loadHelpers, $cached);
    foreach ($this->helpers as $helper) {
        $this->{$helper}->afterRender();
    }
}

Someone find solution for afterRender() calling when loading helpers in the view ?