New resources

Happy Friday everybody ….

2 New resources for you to check out:

1. Javascript Bookmarklets
2. Zend Framework and Firebug – Log PHP warning, errors and exceptions

Don’t forget also of the PHPArch Free Webcast today about Running PHP on Windows with Hank Jansen and Zack Owens.

Have fun .. .

Zend Framework Form Decorators

Decorated Zend Form

This is a great tutorial about using the Zend Framework Form Decorators to construct the form in the way that you want them to be.

It’s a very detailed step by step tutorial and an excellent resource.

Check it out at ZendGeek July post : Zend Form Decorators

Zend Framework Tutorials

I was looking for some info about posting an form with the Zend Framework and I came accross this blog – http://ganeshhs.com/ – it has a great amount of tutorials about the Zend Framework, from the basics to some a bit more advanced.

Cool stuff: http://ganeshhs.com/category/zend-framework

Zend Framework

Come to the dark side of the Force Luke...

This is a small post just to place how rewarding is to know that a good friend, a known .NET developer and defensor of the .NET technologies, migrates, even for a bit, just to do a small project, to the Zend Framework and PHP technologies.

As I have always messed with him: “Come to the dark side of the force Luke” and for my, and all PHP community happiness, he did came.

If there is any developer .NET (or any other language) out there that is in doubt about migrating to PHP, don’t be in doubt and “come to the dark side of the force”

Love, Hate and Zend Framework

I have always heard that love and hate walks together, but I never did believe that this would apply to web programming.

Today a friend of mine sent me this article – Frustration with Zend Controller Action Helpers – that only proves that Zend Framework, and I must say, one of the best frameworks I have ever worked with, still needs a lot of improvement.

Check the article. Is a good perspective of when things go wrong with the Zend Framework.

Please add Ellipsis in ZF

Truncating a long string and adding ellipsis is something that time from time you need to do. The worst of it is that you never remember the function name or how you did at the first time, so you have to re-do it all again.

I was talking to a friend of mine and we both got the same conclusion: this should be at Zend Framework.

Meanwhile when this doesn’t happen, here is a great blog with a function snippet to work it out: http://snippets.jc21.com/snippets/php/truncate-a-long-string-and-add-ellipsis/

Eclipse PDT

I have been working with the Eclipse PDT editor for quite a while now and it impressed me so much that it became my primary editor.

I have worked with Dreamweaver, Zend Studio (this is another extreme great product), Notepad, Edit+ (you should have it – is a life savier) and so many others, but the Eclipse PDT provided me enough tools to work with Zend Framework, core PHP related development, JS scripts, CSS and XML (which is pretty good).

There is a big drawback dough. If you are using Linux (Xubuntu in my case) you should download the Eclipse PDT from their site and not using any installer, since the versions that they have will break with current java versions.

Besides that, is a great FREE PHP editor.

http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/

I always try to help any organization that is development related and will be doing some conference or some event, so…

Eclipse Con 2009 - Santa Clara, CA

Zend Framework Quickstart Review

I have done a ton of work with ZF, but trully haven’t done a full aplication with MVC (as it should be) and today I have finally done the quickstart tutorial from Zend Framework.

It took me more than the half hour said on the tutorial, but that is because I have choosen to create directory by directory and file by file.

The tutorial is very straight forward, but if you follow the tutorial 100% as it should, you will face a couple of walls that you must bypass to continue.

The first big wall is the directory strucutre convention for the files. Check that very closely because if any file is out of place it will throw an error.

The second, and most anoying one, is the database issue. During the tutorial you will be requested to create a database using some scripts and, as you will see, the script does not create the databases specifieds on the ini file and also it does not say to you what are the logical file permissions. After doing some research I have found one good article that answer that all, so if you are facing these problems, check it out (Nabble Article Link).

Note: You must know how to run a PHP script from the command line to use this tutorial. If you are in Linux, just go to the directory requested (for the load.sqlite.php) and type php load.sqlite.php and it should run normally.

After the tutorial is complete you will see the MVC patter working as beautifully as it should, but the tutorial will not answer you all the questions, only will show you how everything works and for that you should use the Zend Framework Reference Guide.

Point is, if you have never worked with the Zend Framework and want to understand how everything works, the tutorial is a great way to start. It will help you to visualize what, where and how it works.

ZendX

I have just started working with a new project and, for the first time in years, I have faced something that I have never heard before – ZendX.

ZendX is a Zend Framework Extensions Library was created with the intetion of improving and building upon a solid Zend Framework.

Among a ton of things, there is a great feature from ZendX that needs a highlight: parallel processing. It provides some great libraries (to be used, in this case, in Linux Boxes) that allow a developer to perform some actions in parallel processing time.

Let’s go to a hipotetical example: Consider that you have 10 file uploads at the same time (like a flash uploader). As you already know, each file will have to be processed one at time, but imagine you being able to proccess all files in paralell! Extreme right!?

Checkout this library from the Google Code Project and what it can do for your projects. ZendX Link

MySQLi Handler Class

Last year I have created a mysqli class to wrap’s it’s most basic methods and encapsulate the whole database layer providing a little bit more of security. I have always felt that were some items on that class that could be re-written and improved, so I have re-created the MySQLi Handler class.

It’s a wrapper for the mysqli methods and query constructor with pagination. It make simplier to work with the daily sql statements in a fast wizard way.

It’s not a Zend Framework Database Manager, but hey, if you cant use Zend Framewor or Pearl DbManager, it might help you.

As a note, for the next version it might have some AJAX methods attached for the pagination process.

Anyway the class is under GNU General Public License and you can download it here