On the Sanisoft blog today Tarique Sani has posted about a method for using the CakePHP framework without a database to back it up.

We recently programmed a CakePHP app which relies solely on remote server talking Saleforce API for all data operations. The first challenge that we faced was how to prevent CakePHP from insisting on a database connection. The solution was simple enough and I never gave it much thought till the same question was brought up by more than one person on the CakePHP list. The solution involves creating a minimal dbo source file.

It's a simple three step process to follow - making the dbo source file, set it up as the default driver and tell CakePHP to $useTable = false.

On the SaniSoft blog Tarique Sani has posted about (and made available for download) some code sniffs for the CakePHP framework. Some problems arose with some of the naming that the framework uses, but with some "tinkering around"...

[It became] apparent that I had to have my own set of Cake sniffs to manage this but a separate standard just for this seemed an over kill and the simplicity of code made it kind of fun to add more standards which I liked but were in different set of sniffs.

You can grab the whole list of sniffs from their downloads. They implemented them as a pre-commit hook on their SVN server even so that developers could not violate the coding standards when they submit their code.