Category Archives: Zend Framework

A Glimpse of Evolving Zend Framework 1.5

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Fellow developers may have noted that Zend released their Zend Framework 1.5 (including the 1.5.1 branch) last March. As a person who was away from ZF development milestone for a while (and when i was back i noticed bunches of emails in the mailing list), it’s interesting for me to see the changes made in the framework. I come up with a slideshow presentation which is grabbed from the ZF homepage.

Interesting feature sets from this release are Open ID integration and the availability of Zend_Form. When I was building my application on the beta platform or the first stable release, creating advanced form with complex view was quite a problem. I will delve more into current source code and documentation and see the logic and approach behind this component. It will also be interesting in finding the approach for ajax interaction model. Regarding Open ID, it’s great that it’s finally bundled in the framework. I believe, Open ID will be more widely adopted and Zend has played its role by supporting the technology in its Framework.

Congratulations to all Zend Framework developers. I hope I will start contributing especially on solving the performance issues.

Zend Framework 1.0, First Stable Release For Your Commercial And Enterprise PHP Web Apps

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zf_logo.pngJuly 1st, 2007 is a monumental day for Zend and their developers. It’s the day when Zend Framework 1.0, the first stable version of the framework, was released to public. What’s with the fuss?

It’s important for a business entity (eg. company) to make sure the business process run smoothly and profitable during the whole cycle. A lot of components are involved in company operation which determine company success, one of them is software (yes, we’re talking about modern companies). For technology-driven company, software provision and implementation is crucial. Software is not only for administration use, it solidifies and improves business process.

Now we’ll get the scope smaller by emphasizing software lifecycle processes on companies which provide web-based service or consider web existence as business image. Serious companies follow certain standard in its operation. By using standard, it will be able to measure the whole process and assess whether the operations succeeded and desired outcome achieved. Talking about software cycle, there are several evolving models used to reflect the software cycle, from the old Waterfall model to international standard ISO/IEC 12207.

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Zend Framework On the Way: Sample Application For Academic Purpose

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Can Zend Framework do you a favor? Does it taste different flavour? If you ask me, the answer is yes.

As Zend Framework (ZF) is on its steady pace to the first stable release, more and more applications are [being] developed on ZF. This is also intriguing me to create some applications which are driven by ZF.

Fortunately, I was offered to create a system for managing final projects in my past department (it’s now recognized as School of Informatics and Electrical Engineering). Considering this as a perfect chance to show properly designed academic software and as a pilot project for other ZF-based applications, I took the opportunity and started developing the application.

Frontend view

Figure 1 Sample user’s frontend view

The application itself is mainly another CRUD application with some remote calls to fetch academic data located at different servers. The remote call API is customized to suit the department’s need. Currently it still relies on POST and GET based supplied parameters. However, it’s likely a custom XML API will be developed to handle the web service.

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Modifying Zend_Db_Adapter_Abstract::quoteInto to accept multiple question marks

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A nice feature from Zend Framework (ZF) is its robust database adapter. Although there is still some work needed to extend the functionality (ORM?) and some strange bugs I encounter when working with multiple tables, Zend_Db package is already good solution for my CRUD application.

In Zend_Db_Adapter_Abstract, there is a function called quoteInto which is used to quote a field value from an sql statement. Most implementation is in where clause like

$where = $db->quoteInto('name = ?','John Doe');

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Zend Framework: A Gem in Less Than A Penny

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I’ve been searching for robust PHP framework which does more than a set of classes. After playing with some frameworks available on the internet, I stumble upon Zend Framework, a framework provided by Zend.

Quoting Zend, this is their definition for Zend Framework

Zend Framework is a simple, straightforward, open-source software framework for PHP 5 designed to eliminate the tedious details of coding and let you focus on the big picture. Its strength is in its highly-modular MVC design, making your code more reusable and easier to maintain. Although it’s currently in preview release, take a look—you may be surprised.

I accentuate on the last phrase, and yes, i was surprised. ZF has clear logic and workflow for what a framework must posses. It has Zend_Loader for loading necessary class and Zend_Registry for keeping object singleton. Zend_View handles the viewer nicely from the MVC and uses PHP directly to parse variables and routines within templates (this is great since some template engines parse variables within templates thus increasing process time and give some overhead). Other features are also nice. You can find them by reading the documentation and manual.

Supported with good documentation, mailing list, and active community, ZF seems promising for being the most popular PHP framework in the future. Give ZF a try. It costs less than a penny.