Pragmatism in the real world
Another minor update with some more bugs fixed. Thanks Holger and Develucas! I've also added an explicit note that the tutorial only works with version 0.1.5 of the Zend Framework. Supporting the development trunk from subversion would be too much work for me! I intend to have a good look at the whole rewrite base thing and see if I can work out what does and doesn't work.
Tomorrow, I go to a (hopefully) final meeting with my client to wrap up the deployment of my first Zend Framework application. It's gone very smoothly as a project all in all and is all over bar the shouting. So what have I learned? In no particular order: Automatic rendering of the template from within the Action's destructor is more hassle than it's worth! It's better to have a render() method and called $this->render() at… continue reading.
I've updated my Zend Framework tutorial to 1.0.1 to fix all the minor errors that people have found. Thanks guys for letting me know! I guess it just goes to prove that that I'm not that good at proof-reading :)
I thought I'd turn my hand to writing a tutorial… As both readers of my blog will have noticed by now, writing prose isn't my strongest point, but hey! you don't have to read it :) I ended up doing it as a PDF as I found writing it in a wordprocessor easier than anything else I tried. It also ended up quite long! The PDF is available at http://www.akrabat.com/zend-framework-tutorial, so please leave any comments/corrections… continue reading.
I have a real world project to deliver that will be based on the Zend Framework, so I'm actually putting in time to get a system that works for me. Some of the work I'm doing, I've decided to release under the same license as the Zend Framework and I've decided to use the name AkCom. I was using Akrabat, but decided that it's too generic for me and I might have other plans for… continue reading.
An question about iteration, arrays and Zend_Config was posted to the Zend Framework's mailing list by Troy Marker. I thought I'd repeat it here as the solution shows how flexible Zend_Config can be. The post was: … First off I am using an XML file for the data: < ?xml version="1.0"?> <config> <lists> <root> <line1> <link>/index/show/gallery/cars/</link> <text>Cars</text> </line1> </root> </lists> </config> I am trying to iterate the file above to create a list in an… continue reading.
Just in case anyone missed it, Zend Framework 0.1.4 is now out! This is an important release as it has Zend_Config in it, along with a host of other stuff :)
When casting around for another file format for Zend Config, I came up with XML or YAML. Obviously I posted to the mailing list for thoughts and Paul Jones suggested the completely obvious: PHP arrays! Another one, perhaps so obvious it is invisible, is a PHP array. Simple, straightforward, fast, no parser needed, open to programmatic manipulation. If it has not already been implemented, it would be trivial to do so. And he's right. One… continue reading.
In case you missed it, the Zend Framework Subversion revision 532 is important as Darby has put in place the test harness fiiles required for testing the incubator code. Thanks Darby! For the tests to pass you must have the following on your include path: /path/to/PEAR /path/to/zend_framework/library /path/to/zend_framework/incubator /path/to/zend_framework/tests You can then run the tests from the incubator/tests directory using php -f AllTests.php. If you don't want to change your php.ini file, then php -d… continue reading.
There's an interesting thread on the ZF mailing list called Default Dirs which deals with where to put your code. It's well worth a read. I've touched on this before, but thought I'd update my half a dozen readers on my current thinking :) The manual suggests: /application /models /views /controllers /document_root /images /styles .htaccess index.php /library /Zend My current directory stucture currently looks like: /application /models /views /controllers /schemas /tests config.ini /scripts /www /img… continue reading.
