Matthew Weier O'Phinney has another post full of Dojo/Zend Framework goodness today - this time he looks at making proper layer files by combining the two.

During my Dojo and ZF webinar on Wednesday, Pete Higgins of Dojo fame noted that I could do something different and better on one of my slides. This particular item had to do with how I was consuming custom Dojo build layers within my code. I contacted him afterwards to find out what he suggested, and did a little playing of my own, and discovered some more Dojo and javascript beauty in the process.

The improvement replaced the need for a manual commenting/uncommenting of an addLayer call with a bit of namespaced layers that, based on the environment, adds a dependency for the right file. One less manual process, one less thing to go wrong on deployment.

• Validate_CA 0.1.3
• Validate_Finance_CreditCard 0.5.3
• Net_DIME 1.0.1
• Log 1.11.2
• Services_Facebook 0.1.4
• Services_Hatena 0.1.2

• Job Posting: Verve Internet Solutions Seeks Web Developer (Philadelphia, PA)
• Job Posting: FAST (Recruiter) Seeks PHP Developer (St. Louis, MO)
• Job Posting: Yahoo! Seeks PHP Developers (Santa Clara, CA)

Lorna Mitchell has posted the last part of her development process towards creating a sample REST server in PHP:

This is part 3 of my article about writing a restful service server. If you haven't already, you might like to read part 1 (covering the core library and grabbing the information we need from the incoming request) and part 2 (covering the service handler itself) before reading this section. This part covers the Response object that I used to return the data to the user in the correct format.

She show how she created the object to push the response back out to the client with an output() method that displays the XML response in a manually generated format.

On the symfony blog today, there's a new post that looks at creating a conditional validator in the context of a classic login form for the framework.

Jon works on a symfony 1.1 project with a classic login form. The form is composed of two fields: a username and a password. The validation rules are quite straightforward: he wants each field to be required and he wants to check the correctness of the password.

They show how to set up a normal login widget and how to apply a sfValidatorCallback in the configure() method to check the values in the form. This method checks the username and password values and tosses an error with sfValidatorError if a problem is found.

Paul Jones has taken a look at some performance statistics that Rasmus Lerdorf shared in a recent presentation from some of his tests.

It was with some interest, then, that I viewed Rasmus Lerdorf's slides on the subject of performance benchmarking. I'm beginning to think there's something unexpected or unexamined in his testing methodology.

Paul compares some of his statistics (gathered from his testing) to those of Rasmus and finds a few places where things don't quite match up - specifically in the default overhead that seems to be a part of Rasmus' stats. Paul goes on to look at EC2 as a cause to the problems but ends up without much of a confirmed answer.

With the recent release of the 1.6 version of the Zend Framework, Andi Gutmans has posted some thoughts and highlights of features in the new version.

The Zend Framework Community has delivered another feature-rich release of Zend Framework and I'm extremely proud and happy to see the energy and excitement around this project. The ZF team (Wil Sinclair, Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Ralph Schindler, Alexander Veremyev) along with many others in the ZF community and at Zend, have been doing a superb job and have been working very hard to put this release together.

He mentions the Dojo integration, the updates to the SOAP component, updates to make test-driven development simpler and a reminder about ZendCon08 coming soon that will feature several Zend Framework-centric talks.

In this new blog post Kae Verens shares a method he came up with to change over about 300 domains' worth of email over from qmail to posfix in an orderly, automated fashion.

Yesterday we had to move about 300 domains from one machine to another. We bought a new machine recently and are taking this opportunity to move from Qmail (difficult to use, in my opinion) towards Postfix. After doing one or two by hand, i decided that's stupid - why not just automate the whole thing.

The script reads from vqadmin and pushes that information over to mailadmin who makes the emails over on the postfix side. The script makes heavy use of the cURL extension to get the job done.

The Zend Developer Zone has a reminder for those in the Amsterdam area - the phpGG user group (newly formed) will be having their next meeting on September 23rd.

On Tuesday 23 September 2008 the Dutch PHP user group will have its first meeting, in what will become a bi-monthly event. The goal is have meetings with other members, enjoy some coffee and tea and meeting other developers and the chance of prizes to win.

Two speakers will be presenting from about 8pm to 10:30pm - you can find out more about the group and the meeting from their site, including how to get there.

Chris Hartjes has a new post to his blog today focusing on using a bit of the CakePHP framework's functionality from the command line.

I'm porting a spaghetti-PHP application over to using CakePHP I am moving their existing authorization system over to using Cake's Auth component. Of course, they are storing all their passwords in plaintext in the user account table, so I needed an easy way to convert all the existing passwords over to be encrypted using the same hash that Auth would use.

With the help of the shells and tasks that the framework makes availiable, he's able to make a simple 24 line class (EncryptPasswordShell) that extends the Shell object and loops through the data to push it back into the database in the correct password format.