PHP, Zend and Other Technology Thoughts

/me watches the tumbleweed...

2008-03-07T09:32:00.000-08:00

Hi to my 5 or so regular readers and all other casual visitors :-)

I'm afraid that due to time constraints I won't be able to update this blog for a while :-(

That said, I am still active over at TalkPHP.com so if you want to pop in for a chat with me and a lovely knowledgable PHP community, you are more than welcome :-)

Sending Emails with the Zend Framework

2008-03-01T13:21:00.001-08:00

I've just published a new article on the Zend_Mail component over at TalkPHP:

Many PHP applications require the ability to send emails nowadays from simple plain-text emails confirming a registration to advanced HTML newsletters.

PHP allows us to send emails using the mail() function but this can quickly get complex when you begin to add HTML, attachments and different character encoding.

Luckily for us developers, the Zend_Mail component from the Zend Framework greatly simplifies the process by providing easy-to-use methods for creating and sending emails.

This article will walk you through creating and sending plain-text and HTML emails, adding attachments, multiple recipients and much more.

You can read the full article here at TalkPHP.com

Database Abstraction with Zend_Db - Part 1

2008-03-01T13:23:00.000-08:00

I've just published a new article about Zend_Db and Zend_Db_Select:

Database abstraction layers provide an important role in modern web applications built with PHP. They allow you to easily switch your back end database server by changing just a few lines of code in your application.

The Zend Framework provides a powerful database abstraction layer in the form of the Zend_Db component. This tutorial will be looking at the Zend_Db component in closer detail.

In Part 1 we will show you how to use the Zend_Db_Select class to build complex SELECT queries simply and quickly.

You can read the full article here at TalkPHP.com

PHP-GTK2 (finally) Released

2008-03-01T13:16:00.000-08:00

Well, the PHP-Gtk team proved me wrong by finally releasing PHP-Gtk2. And to think I'd assumed that the project was dead

PHP-Gtk2 brings lots of improvments over the previous version, including much better window drawing / handling on Windows.

I've written a small example application using PHP-Gtk2 which you can find here at TalkPHP.com

ComputerWorld UK Interview with Ivo Jansch

2008-02-27T13:00:00.000-08:00

ComputerWorld UK have published an interview with Ibuildings Technical Director Ivo Jansch. The interview covers many topics including PHP in the enterprise and Ibuildings itself.

Well worth a read: http://www.computerworlduk.com/toolbo...gid=14

Microsoft offer active support for PDO2

2008-02-27T12:35:00.000-08:00

David Sceppa, a Program Manager at Microsoft has just posted in a debate about PDO v2 on the php-internals mailing list:

Greetings, PDO community! My name is David Sceppa and I am a program manager working at Microsoft on improving SQL Server for PHP data hosting.

Let me first just say that Microsoft is very interested in participating in the PDO 2 effort and I plan to actively engage in the discussions of the spec and the core via the mailing list. As a relative newcomer to this space, Microsoft is highly incented to see a single solution that serves the needs of this community. This is both from the standpoint of technical investment (i.e. we would like to focus our resources on delivering one rock solid answer rather than many across the space), and for customer clarity as having too many choices often winds up being confusing. We believe that PDO 2 is that solution going forward in the PHP space, and we are therefore committed to seeing it through to fruition.

The approach that's been described in proposals (vendor-built drivers can be covered via CLAs while the core components remain CLA-free) is something I believe to be in the best interests of both driver writers and the developers who use PDO. We would prefer to have the spec and the core covered by CLA, so that we can make more direct contributions, yet we understand that the community wishes to keep the spec and the core CLA-free.

Microsoft has a great deal of experience and lessons learned (both positive and negative) through the evolution of ODBC and other data access technologies that give us a unique perspective and we look forward to contributing to the PDO 2 effort. I look forward to diving into more technical discussions on the mailing list on issues such as whether or not there should be a set of core PDO libraries, the PDO metadata vocabulary, driver extensibility, etc.

David Sceppa
Program Manager, SQL Server Driver for PHP
Microsoft

As anyone who has ever used the MSSQL driver in PHP knows, this is extremly good news!

Having an officially-supported Microsoft SQL driver in PHP will really help push it to the enterprise market.

Top Ten Search Terms for the Past 7 Days

2008-02-27T10:59:00.000-08:00

Here are the top 10 Google searches that lead to my blog for the past 7 days:

1. zend_form tutorial
2. settranslator zend_form zend_translate
3. zendbox
4. "guide to programming with zend framework"
5. ibuildings
6. zend captcha
7. zend form tutorial
8. zend_form php
9. "cakephp vs zend"
10. "custom validator" messages zend_form

And here are a few resources to help make your search easier :-)

Zend Form / Translator / Custom Validator Messages

Zend Form Documentation
Using Custom Validation Messages / Translating Them with Zend_Form
Zend Form Tutorial from Rob Allen

Zendbox

Unfortunately, the Zendbox project was scrapped but take a look at this new offering from Zend and Rackspace, along with this blog post, and this one about it.

guide to programming with zend framework

php|architect's Guide to Programming with Zend Framework
Official support site for the book

ibuildings

Ibuildings Website in English and Dutch

zend captcha

I've still not come across any tutorials for writing a captcha script with the Zend Framework but there are plenty of resources out there for creating Captchas with PHP. In particular, have a browse over at TalkPHP.com as the subject of Captcha in PHP comes up often.

CakePHP vs Zend

A Comparison of CakePHP and the Zend Framework
CakePHP vs Zend Framework (from the Zend Framework mailing list)
CakePHP vs Zend Framework (from Cakebits)
More Framework Fun
In Spring Time, A Not-so-young PHP Programmer’s Mind Turns To Frameworks

Hopefully all these resources will help make your search easier :-) The same search terms tend to come up time and time again so if you have any useful resources for these or similar search terms, please let me know.

Update on the Zend / Rackspace offering

2008-02-27T10:24:00.001-08:00

(Original post here: http://citalan.blogspot.com/2008/02/zend-rackspace-offering.html)

It has been over a week now since I filled in the form on http://www.rackspace.co.uk/zend/ to request more details on this offering but have yet to hear anything back so I am assuming that the offering has not launched yet.

The page itself contains a wall of marketing text but very little substantial details in particular, no technical or pricing details.

Although I partularly like one quote on the page - "Fly over the peaks with Zend & Rackspace" - that makes me chuckle every time I read it. I'm not entirely sure what "peaks" they are talking about but I've no doubt we'll find out in due course if Rackspace ever come back to me.

If anyone else has heard from them please let me know via a comment here or email me direct :-)

Zend Framework 1.5 Release Candidate 1

2008-02-26T12:03:00.000-08:00

Good news! Zend Framework 1.5 is moving closer to final release! Wil has just announced that Zend Framework 1.5 RC1 is now available:

We couldn't be happier to announce that Zend Framework 1.5 Release Candidate 1 is now available from the Zend Framework download site!

http://framework.zend.com/download

An overview of new features (also included in the 1.5 Preview Release):

* New Zend_Form component with support for AJAX-enabled form elements
* New action and view helpers for automating and facilitating AJAX requests and alternate response formats
* Infocard and OpenID authentication adapters
* Support for complex Lucene searches, including fuzzy, date-range, and wildcard queries
* Support for Lucene 2.1 index file format
* Partial, Placeholder, Action, and Header view helpers for advanced view composition and rendering
* New Zend_Layout component for automating and facilitating site layouts
* UTF-8 support for PDF documents
* New Technorati and SlideShare web services

This obviously marks a very important step towards a high-quality, highly tested 1.5 GA release. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release in any way: with patches/check ins, documentation/translations, and bug reports. But our work is not yet over! Let's do our best to bring this release to the breaking point to find areas we can improve the release for General Availability. Based on your feedback we will determine in the next few weeks whether we require additional release candidates, so please provide feedback on our issue tracker (http://framework.zend.com/issues) as soon as you can and ask any questions/post your experiences on the appropriate mailing list.

Again, the Zend Framework community does NOT recommend this release for production use. We do, however, recommend evaluating new features in this release with existing and new applications.

Enjoy 1.5RC1, and see you on the issue tracker, wiki, and mailing lists!

Zend Framework 1.0.4 is now available!

2008-02-26T11:59:00.000-08:00

Wil has just announced that the Zend Framework 1.0.4 is now available for download:

It is our pleasure to announce the release of Zend Framework 1.0.4! You can download this new mini-release now from the ZF download site:

http://framework.zend.com/download

With this mini-release we bid a fond farewell to the 1.0 branch as we move on to the 1.5 release. The Zend Framework community has invested the time and effort to leave the 1.0 branch as bug-free as possible. To this end, we have resolved 111 known issues on the 1.0 branch:

http://framework.zend.com/issues/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?requestId=10
691

We couldn't have put this release together without the help of our Zend Framework community, so we here at Zend would like to say thank you once again and keep up the good work!

CakePHP vs Zend Framework

2008-02-21T17:06:00.000-08:00

Interesting post here - http://2tbsp.com/node/87 - a nicely laid out comparison between CakePHP and Zend Frameork. Worth a look if you use CakePHP, Zend Framework, or neither :-)

Zend Form Tutorial

2008-02-21T17:15:00.000-08:00

I know that many of you are looking for some Zend Form tutorials since it is currently the most popular Google keyword that you are all using to reach my blog, so I have good news!

Rob Allen, author of the soon-to-be-released Zend Framework in Action book has written a great introduction to Zend Form.

Dutch PHP Conference

2008-02-21T16:49:00.000-08:00

Good news for those who didn't get tickets to the PHP London conference, Ibuildings and Zend Technologies have announced the second Dutch PHP conference taking place on 13th/14th June 2008. Despite the location, the conference will be in English so be sure to grab those tickets before they sell out!

From the site:

Ibuildings and Zend Technologies are proud to organize the second Dutch PHP Conference on June 14. Plus a pre-conference tutorial day on June 13. Both programs will be completely in English so the only Dutch thing about it is the location. Keywords for these days: Know-how, Best Practices, Networking, Tips & Tricks.

With presenters such as Cal Evans, Lukas Kahwe Smith and Derick Rethans, the program of the first Dutch PHP Conference last year was a great success. We are sure that we will be able to match the quality of the program in 2008. For one we have Zeev Suraski, co-creator of PHP as a mature development language, as the opening keynote. Secondly, there will be a Pre-conference Tutorial day with workshops from the very best. And like last year, the price is still very reasonable!

Tickets are available for the early-bird price of 100 Euros for the conference day, 295 Euros for the pre-conference tutorial day, or 350 Euros for both days.

All the info here: http://www.phpconference.nl

PHP London Conference

2008-02-20T11:55:00.000-08:00

Tickets for this years PHP London conference are now officially sold out so if you planed on attending, I'm afraid that you have missed the boat

Here's a tip for you laptop users

2008-02-20T11:52:00.000-08:00

Don't pull a key off to clear some crumbs below it assuming that it will be like a regular keyboard and can be cliped back on.

1 broken metal hook, 3 broken pieces of plastic and many hours later, I no longer have a left-arrow key on my personal laptop :(

Ibuildings / Zend Partnership

2008-02-20T11:41:00.000-08:00

I received an email today from Ibuildings announcing their launch in the UK as the first official Zend Solutions Partner.

Ibuildings are well-known for their PHP expertise and have been around for about 10 years in the Netherlands. They worked with Zend on the recent re-design of the Zend website which is now built on Ibuildings WDE CMS product.

See below for the main part of the email including details about the up-coming PHPLondon conferance.

Ibuildings, the leading PHP authority in the Netherlands has embarked on its Pan-European expansion by setting up its UK operation. Ibuildings is the first official European Zend Solutions Partner. Already established as the leading PHP authority, with over 7 years of experience in successful implementations of large scale PHP web applications, Ibuildings consultants are amongst the most experienced PHP developers in the business. You can now trust Ibuildings to provide local Zend support and training. Visit www.ibuildings.com now to find out how our UK experts can help you accelerate your PHP projects.

Come and meet us at this year's 3rd annual phplondon conference, on Friday 29th February. As Premier Sponsor, Ibuildings will be discussing the very latest developments in the PHP world. Our very own Ivo Jansch, Chief Technology Officer and author of the PHP business framework 'ATK', will deliver the opening address at 9.30am. He will discuss Enterprise PHP, which is the topic of his next book for php|architect.

Zend / Rackspace Offering

2008-02-19T14:43:00.000-08:00

David Goulden, a Product Manager at Zend has posted a comment on my blog post about ZendBox

He mentions that Zend and Rackspace UK have been working together for the past few months to provide Zend Platform powered hosting with some initial training provided by Zend and on-going support provided by Rackspace's renowned support team.

I've filled in the form for further details and will post them here as I get them.

For further details or to register your interest, take a look at http://www.rackspace.co.uk/zend/

David's full comment for those too lazy to click the link :-)

Hi, yes it got scrapped for a number of reasons, none of which were related to whether it was a good offering or not. I won't bore you with the details.

However, some of us think it is a very nice offering if we could get it aligned with both companies' existing business processes and systems.

So for the past 6 months I've been working through the how and why with Rackspace UK Partners team and Gerhard from their Solutions Team.

Cut a long story short - the joint offering is pretty similar but is based around Zend Platform on Rackspace's Red Hat Linux offering and Zend Studio, with provisioning and initial "hit the ground running" training handled by Zend. You'll get 24/7 support on Zend server components to match and extend Rackspace standard support package and if you need to have your applications benchmarked and optimized, Rackspace UK's Solutions team can assist.

We think this is a great and unique offer to get started with and hope you do too.
More details here: http://www.rackspace.co.uk/zend/ or email me direct (below)

Should be interesting to see how this progresses as myself and many others would kill for a Zend-supported Hosting solution purely because you know that you are going to get the best setup you can for hosting your PHP applications.

Code freeze for 1.0.4 and 1.5.0RC1

2008-02-19T12:31:00.000-08:00

Darby has just sent a reminder about the code freeze for Zend Framework 1.0.4 and 1.5 Release Candidate 1.

The freeze will happen Wednesday 20th February at 9pm EST:

Hi all framework contributors,

First, I want to give a *big* thank you for all the hard work and generous contributions of time and expertise from the community, who make successful releases of Zend Framework possible! :)

This message is a reminder that the code freeze for the 1.0.4 and 1.5.0RC1 releases begins tomorrow, Wednesday, February 20 at 21:00
(9:00pm) PST (GMT-8). All contributors should have completed their work for these releases by this time.

Contributions slated for 1.0.4 should be merged to the release-1.0 branch, and contributions slated for 1.5.0RC1 should be committed to the trunk by code freeze.

After code freeze begins, we'll create a new release-1.5 branch in SVN, from which all 1.5.X releases (e.g., 1.5.0RC1, 1.5.0GA, 1.5.1) will be tested and tagged for packaging.

The 1.0.4 release marks the end of active maintenance on the release-1.0 branch, and the new release-1.5 branch will become the active maintenance branch from which mini-releases such as 1.5.1 would be produced.

During the code freeze, development may continue as usual in the trunk, but merges to the release-1.0 and release-1.5 branches should not occur without approval from a Zend liaison (Alex, Matthew, Ralph, Wil, or myself).

We plan to make available the release packages this Friday for sanity checking by the community over the weekend, and on Monday we'll go ahead with publishing the release if we haven't discovered any show-stoppers by that time.

Thanks again for all your support! :)

Best regards,

Darby

Lifting the Skirt on Zend Framework 1.5 - OpenID

2008-02-19T10:25:00.000-08:00

Cal Evans has posted a tutorial over on the Zend Devzone about using Zend_Auth and Zend_Auth_Adapter_OpenId to create your own OpenId-powered login page.

Since there have been numerous tutorials written regarding Zend_Auth, I won't attempt to make a full tutorial on it. If you are curious, google around, you'll find them. Today though, I'd like to show you a cool new piece that has been added to Auth in Zend Framework 1.5, the new Zend_Auth_Adapter_OpenId.

Read the full article with example code here

New components now in the core

2008-02-18T09:01:00.000-08:00

Matthew announced today on the Zend Framework General mailing list that the Zend_Form component is now in the Core.

Matthews announcement:

Greetings all!

I'm happy to report that Zend_Form is now in core! This means you will no longer need to use the incubator view helper path if you've been using SVN, and also that you can be fairly assured that the API will not change much between now and the final 1.5.0 release.

If you have *not* tried Zend_Form yet, and wish to do so, you can get a snapshot on-demand via Fisheye. Navigate to:

http://framework.zend.com/fisheye/browse/Zend_Framework/trunk/library

and then, in the lower left sidebar, you'll see a box labelled, "Tarball;" select your favorite format (zip, tgz, tbz2), and wait for the download.

Thanks, everyone, for the numerous issue reports and feature requests over the past weeks -- I think the result is a very strong component that will suit many people's form needs.

--
Matthew Weier O'Phinney

Matthew also announced a few more classes are now in the Core

It is my pleasure to report that the following classes have been moved to core:

* Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_Json
* Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ContextSwitch
* Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_AjaxContext
* Zend_View_Helper_Json

along with their tests and documentation. Enjoy!

--
Matthew Weier O'Phinney

Good news indeed!

First impressions count

2008-02-18T03:44:00.000-08:00

It doesn't look like Zend Studio for Eclipse has anything to worry about just yet judging on my first impressions with VS.Php.

On my first attempt at installing it, I downloaded the version for existing installations of Visual Studio since I have Visual Studio Tean System 2008 installed. The installer opened then promptly gave an error saying that I needed Visual Studio 2008 Standard or higher in order to use it.

My next attempt involved downloading the full VS.Php Standalone Edition. I assumed this would include a standalone edition of Visual Studio 2008, but no, it came with 2005 instead.

This instaled fine and seems to work pretty well. The next problem I came across was that everytime a webpage in Internet Explorer 7 had an error, a nice debugger screen popped up asking me if I wanted to debug the page. Clicking no caused IE to hang, clicking yes started up the debugger.

Unfortunately, I'm not a patient man so it promptly got uninstalled. I may have another look at it in the future but for now, I'll be sticking with Zend Studio for Eclipse 6.

Bye-bye Zend Studio?

2008-02-17T15:08:00.000-08:00

I've been using Zend Studio for a long time now and absolutly love it. It is by far the best PHP IDE on the market at the moment.

But... I also love Visual Studio as I do a lot of Windows development (more than PHP infact) so was pleased to stumble across VS.Php tonight.

It's a complete PHP IDE built around Visual Studio 2008. Looking at the website, it appears to come complete with a feature set that will rival Zend Studio for Eclipse and the price is only $99 per developer.

I am downloading the 30 day trial now and will likely be using it in place of Zend Studio for Eclipse v6 for the next couple of weeks to see what it's like.

I'll let you all know how it goes :)

Zend Form in Action

2008-02-17T14:14:00.000-08:00

I've spent the best part of today playing about with Zend Form and am pleased to say that after much testing and many messages to the Zend Framework MVC mailing list, I have finally got my form looking how I want it.

Here it is in all it's glory, complete with custom validators, error messages and styling.

I'll be putting together a complete Zend Form tutorial at some point in the near future and posting it over at TalkPHP.com so be sure to keep an eye on the TalkPHP.com article section!

No more Secure PHP Hosting

2008-02-17T13:59:00.000-08:00

The company that is, not secure PHP hosting in general :-)

Cal Evans posted on his blog recently that he has had to shut down his hosting company (SecurePHPHosting.com).

It's a real shame for two reasons, the first is that is was nice to see hosting aimed specificly at PHP developers and run by PHP developers. The second reason is that I was planning on hosting a couple of upcoming projects there.

Update: Oddly, the website came back online over the weekend.

A lot can happen in a week...

2008-02-14T08:05:00.001-08:00

...unfortunately, most of it is behind the scenes :)

There have been many updates to various components in the Zend Framework this past week in preperation for the up-coming releases of Zend Framework 1.04 and the 1.5 release candidates.

Simon has done some refactoring on Zend_Filter_Input to resolve some E_WARNING errors that where appearing with the new and improved Zend_Loader.

The new component leverages the flexibility of the plugin loader and
performs equally as well if not slightly more efficiently. A couple of
notes:-

* The protected properties '_namespaces' and '_userNamespaces' are
removed (made redundant)
* The 'addNamespace()' method has been marked as deprecated but
maintained for BC. It proxies to addFilterPrefixPath and
addValidatePrefixPath to provide essentially the same functionality

Matthew has been working hard on the Zend_Form component with many updates, fixes and improvments including allows element arrays, imrpovments to Zend_View_Helper_Translate, and much more.

Big news for Zend_Validate, the error messages for Zend_Validate and Zend_Filter_Input are now translatable.

Matthews post to the Zend Framework General mailing list:

Zend_Validate_Abstract now has the following methods:

* setTranslator(Zend_Translate $translator = null)
* getTranslator()
* static setDefaultTranslator(Zend_Translate $translator = null)
* static getDefaultTranslator()

Additionally, internally _createMessage() now checks to see if a translator is registered (either globally or locally); if so, and the translator has a translation for the given error code, it will translate the message *and* do variable substitution.

How does it work?

Let's say you use the 'StringLength' validator. You could then define custom translations for the two error conditions:

stringLengthTooShort = "The string %value% must be longer than %min% characters"
stringLengthTooLong = "The string %value% must be shorter than %max% characters"

Create your translation object:

$translator = new Zend_Translate(...);

Then, in the easiest method, set your validator globally:

Zend_Validate_Abstract::setDefaultTranslator($translator);

And, when you validate:

// in this case, using Zend_Filter_Input:
if (!$input->isValid()) {
// messages are translated!
$messages = $input->getMessages();
}

You can also attach a translator to a single validation class instance:

$stringLength->setTranslator($translator);

though that usage is less useful.

Only messages that have message keys in your translations will be
translated; otherwise, the original message string (or any that you've
set) from the validation object will be used.

And finally, Darby has given some details on the code freeze for 1.0.4 and 1.5.0RC1:

Hi all,

As Wil has previously mentioned, we plan to complete active maintenance of the release-1.0 branch with a 1.0.4 release that will coincide with the release of 1.5.0RC1. This means that we will no longer be actively maintaining the release-1.0 branch.

The code freeze for these releases is currently scheduled for 21:00 (9:00pm) PST (GMT-8) on Wednesday, February 20. Framework contributors should have completed their work for the 1.0.4 and 1.5.0RC1 releases by this time.

There will be a new branch named release-1.5, from which all 1.5.X releases (e.g., 1.5.0RC1, 1.5.0 (GA), 1.5.1) will be tested and tagged for packaging. This new release-1.5 branch will become the active release maintenance branch to which developers should consider merging backward-compatible fixes from the trunk (just like release-1.0 has been up to this point).

During the code freeze, development in /trunk may continue as usual, but merges to release branches (e.g., release-1.0, release-1.5) should not occur during this time without approval from a Zend liaison.

Thanks to all the contributors who make these releases possible!

Best regards,

Darby

Also, I'm back now and all caught up so you should start seeing daily updates again :-)