Loud Baking

While working with Shells, most of the time I have some Tasks taking care of certain specific business logic each. Today, I had the need for a special Task. Special because it was actually a kinda duplicate of an existing Component, my quite useful but still incomplete to share, SerialComponent.

Like I just said, this Component is incomplete and I know that I will be making several changes in the coming month - so quickly, before thinking of duplicate code, good/bad cake or anything like that, I realized that I didn’t want to have 2 different classes to update every time. That been said, what’s coming next is my implementation of a Component inside a Task, which, I still don’t know if it makes a good or bad cake but it at least avoids most of the duplicate code. Maybe there is a better one I don’t know of that would entirely avoid that duplication but until then, the following works.

include CORE_PATH . 'cake' . DS . 'libs' . DS . 'controller' . DS . 'component.php';
include APP_PATH . 'controllers' . DS . 'components' . DS . 'serial.php';

class SerializerTask extends Shell
{
/**
 * Holds instance of SerialComponent
 *
 * @var     SerialComponent
 * @access  private
 */
var $_serial = null;
/**
 * Overrides the shell constructor and instantiate the SerialComponent
 *
 * @access  protected
 */
function __construct()
{
   $this->_serial =& new SerialComponent();
}
/**
 * Pass-thru method for SerialComponent::example()
 *
 * @param   string
 * @param   array
 * @return  array
 * @access  public
 */
function example($type, $params)
{
   return $this->_serial->example($type, $params);
}
}

That’s what was in my /vendors/shells/tasks/serializer.php

From my shell I could now call it like any other task. Do you know of a better method? Keep in mind, I want to use it exactly like a Task, meaning by multiple shells in different methods, so instantiating it when needed becomes more of code bloating IMO. What do you think?