I’m hard at work on Chapter 20, “Working with Third-Party Libraries,” of “The Yii Book“, and making decent progress. The goal of the chapter, really, is to explain how to include third-party libraries without getting a ton of errors about not being able to find the class definition. If you’ve played around in this area at all, then you’ll know what I’m talking about: simple libraries, namespaces, autoloaders…it can get complicated.
A while back, I did an informal survey asking what third-party libraries people would like to see me use in this chapter. Between that input, and my own experiences, I’ve settled upon these examples:
- Swift Mailer
- Symfony (specifically the DomCrawler)
- ElasticSearch
It won’t be a cohesive chapter, but it’ll be quite useful. And the chapter begins with some general instructions on integrating third-party libraries. (Also note that Chapter 19, “Extending Yii,” had an example on using the Stripe library.)
In terms of the schedule, I might do what I did with Chapter 19: post the un-edited version as a separate item first. The next formal release of the book will include both Chapter 20, and Chapter 21, “Implementing Unit Tests”. My goal is to make great progress over the next couple of days and get this next release out this month. That will conclude Part 3, “Advanced Topics,” of the book. Yay!
Looking ahead, Part 4, “Completing Projects,” of the book was originally going to have four chapters, but the ElasticSearch example in Chapter 20 makes Chapter 24, “Implementing a Search Engine,” unnecessary. Part 4 will then have three chapters, which should be do-able in April and May, although I think we all know I can’t be held to that deadline (ugh, actually very sorry for the delays).
And then…it’s a massive update for Yii 2 over the summer! And translations! And a print run! Followed quickly by my retirement!
