Zend Developer Zone: Zend Framework and the New Hybrid Designer
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Ushering in a new term of sorts today is this new article from Nick Lo on the Zend Developer Zone talking about the Zend Framework and the "New Hybrid Designer":   While a good sense of aesthetics is important, it does not in itself directly equate to a well designed product. This is particularly true with web design, as a recent Web 2.0 Expo session entitled "The New Hybrid Designer" put it; "modern web design requires the coding savviness of a developer coupled with the aesthetics and user awareness of a designer".   The idea behind the article is to propose a simple setup of the Zend Framework that developers can use as the powerful system that it is and the designers can get into and understand how to use (things like building forms and templating the site). He touches on a few topics including the MVC pattern the Framework follows, security in the application and the "pretty URLs" that it allows.
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted their latest edition of their podcast - PHP Abstract. In this episode Yossi Leno looks at using the Zend Toolbars to work in your applications.   Our special guest for this episode of the PHP Abstract podcast is Yossi is the product manager for the development tools group at Zend. He is going to talk to us today about using the Zend Browser Toolbars for Debugging and Profiling your applications.   There's two ways to get the new show - download it directly or subscribe to their feed and get the latest ones hand delivered. They've also started a new program to help bring in more community input into the podcast (oh, and they pay too - $75) for making your contribution.
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Cal Evans is attending this year's php/db|works conference up in Toronto and has reported back with his summary of the first day of the conference - "Tutorial Day".   Day One at php|works was dedicated to tutorials. Paul Reinheimer did a 6 hour crash course for those who wanted to take the Zend Certification Test here at the conference. I talked with a three attendees at the Crash Course to get their opinion on how it was going. Cairan Walsh, who is not currently Zend Certified found the course interested although he thought maybe it was a bit too basic.   Cal notes that just about everyone that attended the "Crash Course" was pleased with the contents/teacher/etc. He also mentions his visits to the "Advanced XML and Web Services" and "Extending PHP" tutorials.
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P&aacute;draic Brady is back today with the latest installment (part 5!) of his look at complex views in the Zend Framework. This time, her focuses on something called the Two-Step Pattern - a pattern similar to the Layouts pattern.   Part 5 of our series takes a small time-out from approaching a Composite View solution to reusable Views to take a peek at a simpler approach useful for simpler types of web applications. As we've discussed previously Composite Views allow the nesting of reusable View elements, effectively building a View based on a hierarchy of Views. But often there are simpler solutions to simpler problems. One such solution is the Two-Step View pattern, sometimes called Layouts if implemented in a specific way (as we do below!).   He gives the example of a simple website that needs a header and footer on every page. Rather than having to duplicate the header/footer calls across all of the pages, the Layout (Step-Two) pattern defines a single template that contains the header and footer but also uses a "main" area where the content is dynamically inserted.   He includes a full code example to help illustrate the point - a class, Zps_View, that is fed the path to the layouts and the layout files to use before rendering.
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In this new post to his blog today, Raphael Stolt shows how to combine the Zend Framework and Phing to create a simple, quick setup utility for future ZF projects.   After spending too much time on directory and view script shifting to align an 'older' Zend Framework application to the very useful ViewRenderer Action Helper of the follow-up releases I crafted a single Phing buildfile to stick to the recommended conventions and to have a nearly 'one-button' setup solution for any upcoming projects.    He'd found some other packages that did something similar, but wanted to do it with Phing. He includes the requirements (the software) features that the buildfile makes easy to include and some future improvements that could be made to the install to make things even easier. The buildfile is included and any path or configuration changes that might need to be made.    Phing is a "make" replacement that uses XML build files to define tasks in classes.
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Padraic Brady has posted a manifesto of sorts about the work that he's been doing on his PHPSpec library and trying to work it into the approval process for the Zend Framework.   I'll be attempting to pound the Zend Framework into submission so I can apply Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) using PHPSpec when I write a Controller. Why? Because I feel like it, and it gives me an excuse to promote one possible incarnation of PHPMock and the PHPSpec Zend Framework extension. See? Perfectly reasonable selfishness!   He hopes to move it past the typical test-driven development process that PHPUnit offers and "kick your ass into high-TDD gear" without having to have worked much with it before then (the key is simplicity).   He includes some code examples (how it should flow) and describes some of the challenges that he's coming across so far, specifically with the way that the Zend Framework works with the Controllers and what he wants to accomplish.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Ian Selby's Blog: Uploading Large Files With PHPONLamp.com: Quick and Clean PHP FormsDotVoid.com: Reordering nested sets using PHP and JavascriptRob Allen's Blog: Zend Framework Book Coming SoonCommunity News: php|works Daily Summaries (Day 2)Community News: Sara Golemon & Christopher Jones - First Day Summaries of php|worksJob Posting: University of Wisconsin, Department of Medicine Seeks Web Developer (Madison, WI)Zend Developer Zone: PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 19: Glue Frameworks vs. Full Stack FrameworksStefan Mischook's Blog: Installing PHP and MySQL on the Mac with MAMPSecurityReason: Three Advisories for PHP 5.2.4 (dl, iconv_substr & setlocale)
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As a part of the release of the new book from Manning Publishing, Zend Framework in Action, Rob Allen has created a new site to act as a companion and to host new Zend Framework-related articles - ZendFrameworkBook.com.   The intention is to highlight interesting things that I see on the Zend Framework mailing lists and also to talk about book stuff periodically as well.   A good bit of the content will be summarized from the Framework's mailing lists but will also include other articles/tutorials/updates on proposals/etc that are happening in that community.
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Continuing on from his preamble on the integration of the PHPSpec BDD tool into the Zend Framework, Padraic Brady has posted the next in the series - a look at what it would take to make the integration happen.   The ideal was to move away from line-by-line setup and manipulation of Zend instances towards a more simplified model which is standardised for any PHPSpec specs.   He's already created an "experimental branch" to work inside of and some of these updates have been made to the trunk for the release of PHPSpec 0.3.0. The key that he found was in getting the customization of the "Zend Context operational to set up elements of the FrontController". He also includes a simple example of the extended functionality in action - simple interface methods to work with Twitter.
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On the Zend Developer Zone, Matthew O'Phinney has posted an announcement about the latest development on the Zend Framework front - the ViewRenderer module.    Yesterday, I committed a change to core in preparation for the 1.0.0RC1 release that, while breaking backwards compatibility slightly, will also greatly simplify the integration between the controller and view components.   One developer, Ralph Schindler, felt it didn't go far enough, and posted an issue in the framework issue tracker detailing an idea he had for adding more integrated View dependency injection to Zend_Controller_Action. After some thought and discussion with him, I countered with a new action helper, the ViewRenderer.    This new bit of functionality allows you to get rid of those pesky view objects in Controllers, set default rendering options for the controllers, let you autorender view scripts based on the current action and much more.   Check out the post for some example code.
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Roy Ganor has posted a new article on the Zend Developer Zone about code refactoring, what it's good for and how it can help you and your code.   At first, refactoring seemed to me to be magic, over the years I have come to view it as more of a trick, and today refactoring is integrated into my development environment and used frequently and quickly. Using the refactoring functionality, in addition to other tools, I can sculpt the code to improve legibility and maintainability.   He talks about why PHP developers should jump on getting to refactoring their code, the different forms of refactoring, code examples showing it at work and some development tools/resources you can use to dig a little deeper.
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Chris Hartjes has posted again about the "rebirth" of a Zend Framework component he's worked on - the Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler.   So, dear readers, I received some nice emails and comments from those you have used Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler, along with having a nice email conversation with Wil Sinclair from Zend.   He still wants to "rip things up and start over", but has decided on a slightly different route - mapping the older function calls to the new ones via a __call catch and including a message stating that the older function call would be deprecated.
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Cal Evans has made a new post to the Zend Developer Zone gathering together all the slides he could find from the recent Zend/PHP Conference & Expo (2007):   Most of these have already been posted on the speakers blogs. However, I thought it would be a good idea to gang them all together on one post for those who are looking for them. I've also linked to the blog posts of any speakers who blogged about ZendCon as well. Watch this page for updates, as new slides come in, I'll update the page.   If you were a speaker at the conference and you don't see your slides linked, send Cal at note at cal [at] this domain with your info.
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As posted over on the Zend Developer Zone, there's a walk-through that's been posted for the just-released version of Zend's editor - Zend Studio 5.5.   Earlier this month, I posted the release announcement for Zend Studio 5.5. Today, I got an email from my friend Avigail pointing me to a new web cast recorded by Yossi Leon the Product Manager, Zender, and all around nice guy has released a web cast walk through of some of the new features in this latest release.   The webcast shows off features like the Java code completion, Zend Framework code completion and integration functionality, and Zend Platform integration. If you've been looking around for a new IDE to work up code in, give the demo a look and see what you think.
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KillerPHP.com has a new articles posted today looking at another one of the components of the Zend Framework - Zend_View.   As part of a series of articles about the Zend Framework and MVC, I'd like to take some time and cover Zend_View (the 'V' in that MVC triad).   He touches on where the Zend_View component's place in life is and even includes some sample code to show one in action (along with an explanation of what it's doing).
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In a new note today, Matthew O'Phinney shares some of his experience as being asked to head up the MVC team for the Zend Framework, including some of the changes that have been made.   The experience has been incredibly rewarding, however, and I've had the chance to pick the brains of and work with some top-notch developers in the process. In the next week or so, we'll be releasing version 0.6.0 of the framework, and it will include much of my work in the MVC components as part of the core distribution.   Some of the changes he lists include:  changes that promote greater flexibility and testing controller classes are now unit tested the introduction of the request and response objects a router is no longer needed the ability to push parameters into the front controller  He also gets into a bit of detail on the Response object - what it is, how it works, and how you can set up your own custom versions of it. Check out the full post for more information.
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Leo Buttiker has posted a release announcement about the new framework they've developed - Trevi.   There're already thousands of web frameworks out there so I would sink into the ground if we really wrote another one. [...] Zend Framework looked like a nice solution. But what we probably liked most is that ZF allowed us to replace every component in the framework.    To this end, their "framework" isn't truly a new way of doing things - it's just a heavily modified version of the Zend Framework they've customized to fit their needs. Trevi is their own internal name for this release.