Aaron Wormus: 5 Minute Zend Cert. Guide Review
500567
Aaron Wormus has a new posting over on his weblog talking about a "5 Minute Review" of the Zend Certification Study Guide.
264910
Scott Mattocks, like so many others, has just reciently recieved notification that he's been accepted as a speaker for the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo this fall. He talks more about his speech in his latest post.   My session, "Consusming Web Services with PHP-GTK 2&#8243; will be a look at how to turn a web services API into a desktop application. I only have fifty minutes so it won't be very heavy on implementation details. Instead it will look more at representing different data structures, collecting different types of data and how creating a desktop application can make life easier for the company and the end user.   Scott joins other speakers for this great event, including speakers like Ilia Alshanetsky, Wez Furlong, and Zeev Suraski. Be sure to check back on the Zend site soon to see when Scott and others' talks will be held.
185572
On the ProDevTips.com website, there's a new tutorial (part one of a series) that walks the developer through the integration of the Zend Framework, some Ajax functionality and Smarty to create a feed reader.   In this series I will walk you through the code of a site that uses only Ajax and Scriptaculous to handle it's completely windowed interface. Making an interface like this is not really good design, it's only done here for the sake of teaching. It is kinda cool though. Especially if you have a big screen.   The source code is available for download and having it makes the installation and setup of the system much simpler. With it, you're only about fifteen steps away from getting the application up and running.
137967
In a new post to his blog today, Paul Jones mentions his podcast for the Zend Developer Zone (a Solar Overview) and provides the script that he worked from to record the show.   In this episode, I'm going to give a brief overview of Solar project and how it helps with the mundane aspects of building applications. Solar is an open-source library and framework for PHP 5; you can read more about it at solarphp.com...   The rest of the show notes includes links to things like Yawp, Solar's built-in localization and it's exception handling code.    Check out more about Solar at Solarphp.com and check out the PHP Abstract podcast episode Paul recorded on the Zend Developer Zone site.
259423
Rob Allen has posted about a small modification that he made to his Zend Framework setup that allows for a little safer echoing of information out to the View later of an application.   One of my biggest issues with using PHP as the templating engine in View scripts is that the easiest way to echo a variable is the least secure. [...] So, I decided to leverage a post by Mike Naberezny from a while ago about streams. The idea is all his; I just modified it to work with Zend Framework's Zend_View the way I wanted it to.   His method uses a slightly different output format - instead of using a normal echo statement to push out the escaped output, it uses a special syntax using the "@" sign as a shortcut to the call to escape(). He includes the code you'll need to make it work in your ZF install and explain it a bit (including where the real key lies - in stream_popen).
402184
Continuing on with his look at his OpenID library and its implementation, Padraic Brady has two new posts with more of the story.   From the first post:   As a follow on from my previous entry about OpenID in the Zend Framework, I've been in brief contact with Dmitry Stogov across a scattering of emails. Dmitry posted his OpenID proposal for the framework over at the Proposals Wiki earlier in the week. [...] It's actually very hard to comment constructively rather than simply handing over my code which probably says a lot more all by itself. [...] Anyway, I've agreed to port my OpenID library to PEAR as a PHP5 package. I checked with the mailing list, and the approach I've taken in splitting the library across a number of freestanding components hasn't seen any objections. On the flipside, it does help by providing upgrades to existing PEAR Encryption packages which are not yet migrated to PHP5 versions.   And from post number two:   Over the weekend, I managed to grab a few hours to dig around my OpenID library with the ultimate development tools: patience and experimentation. [...] What I've refactored towards is a splitting of the OpenID process based on three categories: Request, Redirect, Response.
14983
Developer.com has a new tutorial posted today dealing with a specific use of one of the more popular PHP frameworks currently, the Zend Framework, and using it to create multi-lingual websites from Jason Gilmore.   Despite my best attempts I'm unable to speak this array of languages, but as a Web developer I wanted to create the most efficient means for hosting a multi-lingual support site, and then work with native speakers to translate the English material. Because the support site runs the Zend Framework, naturally I wondered whether some sort of translation component was available, and sure enough a quick perusal of the Zend Framework website turned up Zend_Translate. In this brief tutorial I'll document how I'm using the Zend Framework to make my website available to the world.   Jason breaks up the article into two main sections - an introduction to using the Zend_Translate component and examples of it in action (including the creation of CSV files to trade out the translations.
632234
Chris Hartjes has posted an update on the Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler package for the Zend Framework, including writing the unit tests to ensure it's complete functionality.   In my spare time I've been banging away at writing the required unit tests for the Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler component that Derek and I had started. I finished all the unit tests for the user based functions, which is a nice milestone. Then I decided to go back and actually read the comments made from the proposal. Oops. I discovered there were a bunch of changes that the folks at Zend said needed to be made in order to accept them. I agree with most of them.   He also lists some of these comments/changes/suggestions for the package that were given to help it fit in better with the rest of the framework.
90155
Based off of a previous article from Mike Willbanks, Stuart Herbert has posted some of his own thoughts on tuning and tweaking your applications for the best performance you can get out of them.   There's some good advice in there, and I thought it'd be a good idea to quickly add a bit more detail about the separate approaches that Mike raises.   He goes over the APC caching, memcache, the "gzip trick", the "Not Modified" header and optimized SQL statements.   He also mentions one thing that Mike didn't mention - a split between static files (no PHP needed) and their dynamic cousins. Having a more pure Apache (no PHP installed) can help give a minute jump in speed that, depending on the size of the site, could really add up from a user's perspective.
695342
The Zend Developer Zone has posted their latest podcast episode in their PHP Abstract series today. The show i shosted by Chris Hartjes again (see his previous show) and discusses the difference between "glue" and "full stack" frameworks.   Today's special guest is Chris Hartjes. Chris has been building PHP applications since 1998. Currently employed as a Senior Developer for the Cake Development Corporation, Chris has been labeled as an "agent provocateur" within the PHP community. [...] Today Chris is going to talk to us today about Glue Frameworks vs. Full Stack frameworks.   The show can be downloaded directly from here or, as always, you can drop the url to their feed into your favorite aggregator and get this and other great episodes of PHP Abstract.
111197
The Zend Developer Zone has posted some information about a screencast of the QEDWiki they've covered previously from IBM.   We've covered QEDWiki before but so far we've only had screenshots to show. Now we've got a full blown screencast. The demo application they show is the "hardware store" scenario we first saw in the article with Dan Gisolfi. Each time I see a new screencast of this application it gets better. This time, the properties panels are fleshed out and everything looks a lot more finished.   They remind readers of what the QEDWiki is - "the most sophisticated applications to have been built on top of the Zend Framework so far" that allows users to create applications in a drag and drop style right on a wiki page. Check out the screencast for a look at how it all works.
390323
Joseph Crawford has posted some of his thoughts on the mock testing that the folks over at php|architect are offering to help people prepare for Zend's PHP 5 Certification Exam.   So are you getting prepared to take the new PHP 5 Certification Exam offered by Zend?  I have yet to see any books released for the preparation like i did with the PHP 4 exam, however there is something new and very cool.  php|architect offers a Mock Tesing Environment which is powered by Vulcan Web Testing System.   Joseph talks about his experience, noting how he took the test and some of the topics that it covered. He definitely suggests taking it, too, as it provides a good glimpse into what you can expect come exam day.
736098
Patrick Reilly has a new post today encouraging developers out there looking for an opportunity to volunteer in the community to check out the Zend Framework project's many needs.   Most components and subprojects need volunteers to help with documentation, unit test coverage, code reviews, improving integration with other ZF components, and enhancing architecture and design for the purpose of improving extensibility and ease of use with new components. If you see a subject area or component that interests you, please contact any project members currently associated with the component.   The project is starting several wiki "websites" dedicated to each of the components/efforts inside of the main framework project. Areas for these include:  Auth Team Documentation Team MVC Team Web Services Team
654789
Padraic Brady has posted today about a subclass of the Zend_Loader package (in the Zend Framework) he had written up to handle Dependency Injections - it was submitted but ended up being replaced with a Zend_Di component instead.   I realised someone had proposed a novel new component called Zend_Di, and that small change was since accepted by Federico into his DI buster. This is a quick overview with very simple use cases - read the full proposal for even more gory details about your object innards using DI.   He talks about what DI (dependency injection) is and what it can be used for and includes a simple example set around a controller in the framework that uses the Zend_Di component to make a "mock Zend_Mail" that can be used in testing too. Examples of these sorts of tests (with PHPSpec) are included too.
387178
The Zend Developer Zone has posted the latest episode of their PHP Abstract podcast series with a focus this time on screen scraping (as recorded by Matthew Turland).   Matt has been building PHP applications since 2002. He joined the ranks of PHP-Oracle developers in 2006 when he became a programmer for METHODS Technology Solutions. He contributes to open source projects such as the Zend and Forkr frameworks. [...] We are going to veer off the beaten path today as Matthew talks to us about Screen Scraping.   You can download the mp3 directly or you can  to get this and the most recent episodes.
684070
Chris Shiflett has a new posting on his weblog today that might interest anyone out there looking to take (and pass) the Zend PHP Certification Exam.
131725
php|architect magazine has released a new tool related to the PHP5 Certification Exam to help anyone wanting to prepare themsevles for exam time a chance to see how well they'd do and what kind of questions are on the test - a new testing tool, the Vulcan Zend PHP Certification Mock Testing.    Vulcan is our brand-new mock testing system that enables you to verify your readiness for the new Zend PHP 5 Certification Exam.   Based entirely online, Vulcan gives you a quick, easy and effective way of testing your knowledge on the topics that count for the real exam.    They mention some of the features the testing has, including the same types of topics/question distribution/pass grade/etc and even gives you a breakdown of the topics you need to brush up on before the real exam. Best of all, it's only about $22.00 USD for a 10-credit pack (that's ten times to practice up on your skills and get as ready as possible for the exam).   If you're considering taking the exam, I'm not sure you could get a much better deal than this.