All posts in Zend Framework

Write Code for Humans

By On September 28, 2011 In Application Development, Interface Development, Symfony2, Zend Framework With No Comments Permanent Link to Write Code for HumansPermalink

After working on high-performance projects for a while (or aspiring to), it gets easy to build things in such a way that favors performance over readability. It’s good to be reminded every once and a while that while we develop code for computers to execute, ultimately it’ll be humans who will work with them.

Mobile web applications are an interesting example. A large portion of the code is downloaded and executed by remote clients, so we tend to pay more attention to total file-size, number of HTTP requests, and ultimately how much code gets executed on the other end. If we are graded on our work, surely this is what will be looked at. There are benchmarking tools such as Yahoo YSlow and Google Page Speed which help you analyze your site and suggest techniques to apply. Naturally, everyone wants an A or a high rating.

About a week ago, I was looking over one of my projects, and wondered what the hell happened to the code; it was awful. White-space was missing in a lot of areas, CSS was condensed (in most places), and even some of the PHP caching code was pretty hackish. Since I was having to rebuild a large component of the project for other reasons, I made an effort to clean up these concerning areas.

If you can optimize your architecture or design as you go, then by all means do it. What you shouldn’t do; however, is try and remove things that affect readability in favor of performance. I think there are two acceptable ways to do this… as part of a build/deployment script, or as a filter in production. Your development copy should always be for humans. Developer time is often significantly more expensive than server resources. Let’s look at some of the various resources we need to deal with… Continue Reading →

Using Zend_Db With Silex

By On July 15, 2011 In Symfony2, Zend Framework With 2 Comments Permanent Link to Using Zend_Db With SilexPermalink

I’ve been messing around with Silex (and of course Symfony2) a lot lately, and I was excited to see a Doctrine extension. However, it was only for the DBAL and not the ORM. In my symfony2 apps, I’ve finally adjusted to using Doctrine’s ORM, but for some reason, I’ve really grown to like the DBAL that Zend_Db offers over the pseudo SQL (DQL) that Doctrine has. Here is a quick Extension to get you started with Zend_Db.

<?php
 
namespace SyndExtension;
 
use SilexApplication;
use SilexExtensionInterface;
 
class ZendDb implements ExtensionInterface
{
    public function register(Application $app)
    {
        $app['autoloader']->registerPrefix('Zend_', $app['zend.class_path']);
 
        $app['db'] = $app->share(function() use ($app) {
            return Zend_Db::factory($app['db.adapter'], array(
                'host'     => $app['db.host'],
                'dbname'   => $app['db.dbname'],
                'username' => $app['db.username'],
                'password' => $app['db.password']
            ));
        });
    }
}

Create that under ./src/Synd/Extension/ZendDb.php. To use it, you’ll need to add Synd to your autoloader, and then register the extension in your application:

$app['autoloader']->registerNamespace('Synd', 'src');
 
$app->register(new SyndExtensionZendDb(), array(
    'db.adapter'      => 'mysqli',    
    'db.dbname'       => 'your_db',
    'db.host'         => 'localhost',
    'db.username'     => 'root',
    'db.password'     => '',
    'zend.class_path' => '/path/to/zf/library'
));

Please note that this is a quick and dirty bridge, and is for ZF1 not ZF2. If I’m breaking any best practices with naming and combining libraries, be sure to let me know. I’m hoping to explore the Zend_Db and Zend_Form combination since I use them heavily in my apps. This provides a very lightweight infrastructure in order to throw up quick proof of concept applications.

Hopefully this helps someone… or at least gives enough familiarity for my ZF buddies to start looking at Silex / Symfony2. ;)

Inline Zend Form Hints

By On August 16, 2010 In Zend Framework With 4 Comments Permanent Link to Inline Zend Form HintsPermalink

One thing I always enjoy on sites is when they use the inline hints on text elements. Once you click on the element, the text disappears, and typically re-appears when it loses focus again, assuming it’s still empty. Semantically, these have quite a different meaning than what a description is, so it’s nice to also give users an example of the data, or an explanation of what you expect them to enter. This is a huge help when you require certain formats of data (URLs, emails, dates, etc.)

I’ve been messing around with my base Zend_Form class and came up with a solid implementation now. I’ve also expanded the concept to select elements, in which case it’d create a zero-value option with your hint. This entire inline hint concept is enabled by JavaScript (in this case, jQuery), so when JavaScript is not enabled, nothing different will happen for users. I think that’s ideal. Continue Reading →

Zend Framework Models – Part 1: Concepts

By On February 22, 2010 In Zend Framework With 14 Comments Permanent Link to Zend Framework Models – Part 1: ConceptsPermalink

The power in Zend Framework lies in its uncompromising flexibility. However, evidently, this also means its very difficult for new ZF users to pick up the framework and hit the ground running. The most common question I see is usually “where is the model?”. The goal of this post is to show some examples and hopefully some new ideas on how to tackle models. There is no one-size-fits-all solution folks. Let’s look at some options and some background… Continue Reading →

Testing Zend_Mail

By On February 14, 2010 In Zend Framework With 8 Comments Permanent Link to Testing Zend_MailPermalink

Since I work on a local development machine/server, I’ve never taken the time to set up mail yet, nor do I want to. I think a staging environment is more appropriate to actually have email being sent out. Nevertheless, it has made testing any email functionality a little cumbersome. I’ve done a little research, and have found two ways to tackle the problem. I’ve also included code samples and other resources to get you started. Continue Reading →

Caching Zend Framework Forms

By On February 10, 2010 In Zend Framework With 4 Comments Permanent Link to Caching Zend Framework FormsPermalink

Generating a form is an expensive process in ZF. It’s always bugged me that I can’t find any resources on trying to cache the initial HTML anywhere, so I took a stab at it myself. I use a loader from inside my controller action to load forms and models, so I found that was a good place to start.

Here is my initial loader class, which I have stripped down and simplified for the sake of this example. Ideally, you’d want this in something like an action helper. Continue Reading →

Forms in Zend Framework

By On February 9, 2010 In Application Development, Zend Framework With 12 Comments Permanent Link to Forms in Zend FrameworkPermalink

I’m often asked what my favorite component of Zend Framework is, and I invariably answer: “Forms”. Forms have always played an awkward role in the model-view-controller paradigm. Sure, the form is just HTML, but to me, it represents something more abstract than that. It represents the HTML form itself, taking user input, normalizing and validating it, and also being able to show the form again when errors occur. This can take quite a large amount of code. Continue Reading →

Installing Magento without Mcrypt

By On February 5, 2010 In Magento, System Administration, Zend Framework With 9 Comments Permanent Link to Installing Magento without McryptPermalink

Disclaimer: in a production environment, spend the extra time and resources to meet Magento’s requirements. This post is about setting up a development environment.

I have had one hell of a time trying to get Magento up and running on my development server. I have probably spent about 5 hours fighting with mcrypt and for some reason, it is just not playing nicely with my setup (PHP 5.3, with everything compiled manually). I brought in a server guru as well, and he had the same problem. I think we both tore out some hair.

I’ve hacked together some steps to get it up and running for developers who want to get their hands dirty quickly. Continue Reading →