Making Cakephp and Shindig work together

So we decided to use Shindig for our web console widgets. There is lot of documentation on how to make shindig work as a virtualhost.

However, I didnt find complete documentation on how to make it work as a Alias (say www.domain.com/shindig/xxxx)
Where your Cakephp app runs at www.domain.com/

So basically, we have cakephp running as virtual host and our gadgets/widgets will be provided by shindig using the url www.domain.com/shindig/gadgets/ifr

Just few days ago, I read an interesting point in a performance article on Android code site - (paraphrasing) there are two phases of learning to developing on a new platform - first step is to make it work, second step is to make it work the right way.

So here is what I did and made it work - now you readers tell me how to make it work the right way.

I did svn co of Shindig in my downloads directory.
From there, I exported the following directories into vendors/shindig directory of my cake app.
- config
- features
- javascript
- php

So far so good.

In shindig/php/.htaccess file have the following line uncommented:
RewriteRule (.*) /shindig/index.php [L]

In shindig/php/config/container.php update as follows:
'web_prefix' => '/shindig',
'default_js_prefix' => '/shindig/gadgets/js/',
'default_iframe_prefix' => '/shindig/gadgets/ifr?',


In shidig/config/container.js, change all occurences of %host% with %host%/shindig. When I did it, there were 5 instances.

Now the shindig side is updated.

Next we need to tell Cakephp to ignore shindig urls. So, in your root .htaccess file
add
RewriteRule ^shindig/.*$ - [L]
Getting this to work took me a good part of the day. But hey, I now know how mod rewrite works, which I never bothered to learn till now.


Last part, we need to update the apache virtual host, so I added the following block:

Alias /shindig /dev/coolproduct/vendors/shindig/php
<Directory /dev/coolproduct/vendors/shindig/php>
</Directory>



Now, I put in a sample container and a widget, which I can load using:
http://local.domain.com/shindig/gadgets/files/coolappsamplecontainer/coolappsamplecontainer.html