In a new post to his blog Jani Hartikainen wonders if, out of all the PHP frameworks out there, the Zend Framework is the right one for those new to the scene should be starting with.
I've heard some inexperienced PHP programmers say that Zend Framework is confusing to them. Until today, I have agreed: Zend Framework has a lot of classes and some of them are quite complex (such as Zend_Form). But does that actually make it more difficult for inexperienced programmers than other frameworks?
He argues a bit for and against, noting that the ZF docs can eb a bit thin in places but that the framework's architecture more than makes up for it (even if you're not completely sure how it works, you drop it in and it still does). He also mentions some of the hurdles they've had at his work trying to get yunger developers up to speed in their development with the framework.
A recent post from Francois Zaninotto has been getting a lot of attention recently. It's his look at what would be needed to design a complete CMS and the full architecture behind it.
When faced with the alternative between an off-the-shelf CMS or a custom development, many companies pick solutions like ezPublish or Drupal. In addition to being free, these CMS seem to fulfill all possible requirements. But while choosing an open-source solution is a great idea, going for a full-featured CMS may prove more expensive than designing and developing your own Custom Management System.
He breaks it up into sections that look at the hidden costs behind custom development, what components it takes, the environment to build in and some of the fundamental questions you need to ask before even getting started.
The symfony blog points out more new functionality included in the latest version of the framework - a move towards a RESTful architecture.
Yesterday, I have committed the first slew of changes to the routing framework. Thanks to this refactoring, developers have new opportunities to customize the routing and this will allow very cool features in the very near future. But today, let's dive into the goodness of the symfony 1.2 routing framework.
He illustrates the (now built-in) routing functionality that allows you to define customized routes that can do things like pattern matching and can push the output through another external function to handle the results. He also takes a look at the sfRequestRoute component that forces the request to match the route definition
On the Ibuildings blogs, there's a new post from Stefan Koopmanschap taking a look at the latest major release of the Symfony PHP framework (v1.1) and some of the functionality it includes.
The official stable release of symfony 1.1 is now nearly a month old, and response so far has been fairly positive. This is not surprising, as this new version adds a lot of flexibility to the already flexible system that symfony offered. Let's have a look at symfony 1.1, and specifically to the points that I feel are especially exciting in this new release.
He looks at the new architecture of the framework, how it now handles forms, the improvements to the plugin system and the (partial) integration of the Propel ORM layer for accessing databases. The full listing of updates can be found here.
In this new post to the PHP::Impact blog, Federico takes a look at the architecture behind one of the PHP community's most popular frameworks - the Zend Framework.
Before we begin our exploration of the architecture of the Zend Framework (ZF), it is important to discuss how a typical MVC application is built. Examining and understanding the architecture of an MVC Web application allows you to make more contextually sound choices when building your application.
He starts with a look at a three-tier architecture (presentation, application, data) and compares that to the MVC used in the Zend Framework. He talks about how ZF is a hybrid component and infrastructure framework and the coupling that it provides between its components. He also has a few criticisms namely some performance issues from this style and the lack of a module to handle model/controller dependencies.
The PHP::Impact blog has posted about a presentation given by Cal Henderson of the Flickr team on the site's architecture and how it uses PHP.
Topics mentioned in the talk included Flickr's use of shards, memcached, Smarty, ImageMagick, Apache and cvsup for distributing files across their networks.
The presentation can be viewed/downloaded from here.
Prior to their release of the next big jump in the Symfony framework, Fabien Potencier wanted to introduce people to the new version and what they can expect.
Apart from the newexcitingfeatures we have in symfony 1.1, this version also represents a year of hard work to refactor the internals. Let's dig into symfony internals a bit!
They talk about the new platform that everything is built of off now including the framework itself (complete with diagrams mapping out the different parts of the MVC whole).
If you're a MediaWiki user, the PHP::Impact blog has a list of twenty extensions you don't want to miss out on:
MediaWiki is a great PHP-based Wiki application that is used to power many sites, including Wikipedia itself. One of MediaWiki strengths is how easy it is to extend with its plug-in architecture. The following is a list of 20 extensions that should make your life easier and save you a fair bit of time.
The Zend Developer Zone has posted the latest episode of their PHP Abstract podcast series - an introduction to Service Component Architecture.
Today's special guest is Graham Charters. Graham works at IBM's development lab in Hursley, England. His past roles have included WebSphere Application Server development, and architecture responsibilities in WebSphere Business Integration, and Adapters. [...] Today Graham is going to talk to us today about the Service Component Architecture, or SCA.
Graham talks about what SCA is and includes a mention of the PECL package that enables PHP applications to work with multiple data sources seamlessly.
The Zend Developer Zone has posted the latest episode of their PHP Abstract podcast hosted by Rob Richards and covering service oriented architectures in PHP.
Our special guest today is Rob Richards. Rob is an author and maintainer of many of the XML-based extensions of PHP 5, as well as one of the maintainers of libxml2. He is also the author of Pro PHP and Web Services, published by Apress. Rob is going to give us an overview of Service Oriented Architecture and what it means to us as PHP developers.
The direct link to grab the show is here, but you'd be doing yourself a favor to subscribe to the podcast feed and get all of the great content on a wide variety of topics presented by the experts.
