THIS WEEK IN THE ZEND FRAMEWORK. ISSUE #8

p. I know the news that Google released “trends”:http://www.google.com/trends just so we could track “THE JIPLFOG”:http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/249 overshadowed just about everything else this week. Regardless, grab a shovel and let’s dig hard to see what news we can find from the Zend Framework mailing list. This week the list really started picking up steam. Recovering from a slump the past couple of weeks, we see just about all the regulars checking in as well as some fresh new faces.

p. Since I was (unjustly) accused of forgetting this one last week, we’ll kick off with

* “Zend_View_Pagination and download available”:http://www.zend.com/lists/fw-general/200605/msg00294.html. Alexandre Riveira threw down with a formal proposal for solving the pagination problem. It didn’t generate must discussion but since “Andi and the Framework Crew”:http://framework.zend.com/contributors emptied the proposal bucket it’s good to see new ones being dumped in to fill it back up.

* Johannes Orth threw out a pre-proposal (like an informal proposal but not quite as formal) with “Localization”:http://www.zend.com/lists/fw-general/200605/msg00273.html. The ensuing discussion included a link to an interesting “schooling”:http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2002/06/13/php.html on the concepts behind gettext. The thread seemed to have petered out with a lot of talk about wrappers and reinvented wheels.

* On a related (?) note, Matthew Ratzloff hijacked the thread briefly to discuss a PHPDoc question with “@package”:http://www.zend.com/lists/fw-general/200605/msg00290.html. Mike quickly responded and opened a “ticket”:http://framework.zend.com/developer/ticket/38 to deal with the issue. While Matthew didn’t get exactly what he wanted a solution was proposed that looks like it might work. Mike checked in a lot of changes to the SVN to implement the solution and help Matthew out.

* “Proposal Summary”:http://www.zend.com/lists/fw-general/200605/msg00052.html continued this week when Ralph Schindler posed some questions for discussion about sessions. The questions were well thought out and showed that he had done his homework. The thread seemed to wander a bit off course but Ralph promised a v3 of his proposal that will encompass the suggestions that have been made to date. Looking forward to it Ralph.

* Nicola Pignatelli informally proposed (because no official proposal was sent) “new Zend_Validate proposal”:http://www.zend.com/lists/fw-general/200605/msg00300.html. The general consensus was that for any proposal to be considered, it need to be submitted to the list “according to the guidelines”:http://framework.zend.com/faq#q6. This not only ensures that everybody gets a say but it ensures that I’ve got something to write about every week.

* Yours truly kicked off a discussion on “Component Naming Conventions”:http://www.zend.com/lists/fw-general/200605/msg00316.html. It’s a classic example of why those of us who write about things should not get directly involved in them. Paul M. Jones eventually schooled me ever so politely when he said:

bq. “These are called “PEAR channels.” Solar and Savant already make use of this convention, as does Davey Shafik’s Cortex (“Crtx”) project, Greg Bear’s “Chiara”, and various others. Zend’s, of course, is “Zend”.

* Moving right along in an attempt to avoid any additional personal embarrassment, Nicola Pignatelli diverted attention from my gaffe with his “new Zend_Ecommerce proposal”:http://www.zend.com/lists/fw-general/200605/msg00313.html. An informal but somewhat detailed look at what it would take to basically build a Zend shopping cart class. The discussion wandered around a bit before petering out. Mislav pointed out that it might not fit to have a specific class like this included in the framework. This was promptly followed , as this comment usually is, with a pointer to Zend_Service_Amazon as a highly specific piece of the framework. To get the discussion back on track, Christopher Thompson added some interesting ideas that he had implemented in the past in e-commerce and might be of interest if a Zend_Ecommerce class is actually formally proposed. (Because, as we have learned, “Hey I’ve got this idea…” is not a formal proposal.)

* “New Helper proposal/Feedback”:http://www.zend.com/lists/fw-general/200605/msg00325.html was a quickie by Borja Fernandez that shows how these things should be handled. Not only did he propose an idea, he wrote the code and opened a “ticket”:http://framework.zend.com/developer/ticket/45 to get it included. Nice, clean, good job Borja.

* Morgan Whitney proposed (don’t worry, this one doesn’t need a formal proposal) “Announcement List Needed”:http://www.zend.com/lists/fw-general/200605/msg00330.html. There was a lot of back-slapping and +1s. Andi summed up nicely with

bq. Good idea. I’ll try and get one setup.

*NEXT*

* In one of the longest discussions this week Fabien MARTY fired up the debug machine with “Need gmail users for reproducting (or not) a bug”:http://www.zend.com/lists/fw-general/200605/msg00345.html. This is a long and involved thread on why Zend_mail isn’t playing nice with gmail. It ended with the opening of a “ticket”:http://framework.zend.com/developer/ticket/42 that sums it up nicely with:

bq. After a long thread on the ML, we consider that it is a qmail bug and not a Zend_Framework one.

* OpenMacNews was back with us this week after his record breaking week last week when he started “still failing to get the right path”:http://www.zend.com/lists/fw-general/200605/msg00369.html. He’s still fighting with integrating Smarty and ZF. He is kindly keeping a “journal”:http://www.phpinsider.com/smarty-forum/viewtopic.php?t=7865 of everything he has to do to get things working. This looks to be a great addendum to “Ralf’s article”:http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/120.

* Ghulam Mustafa liked his proposal “Proposal: Zend_Graph”:http://www.zend.com/lists/fw-general/200605/msg00392.html so much he formally submitted it twice. Again with the “reinventing the wheel” discussion; pointers to other graphing libraries flew fast and furious during the discussion over whether it is better to write a Zend specific graphing library or use one of the existing ones. The wild ride finally ended with Mislav saying:

bq. I think we’ve reached consensus here … no need to recreate existing library (better contribute to PEAR::Image_Graph, as said).

* Richard “My personal hero of the week” Thomas announced in “Mailing List searching”:http://www.zend.com/lists/fw-general/200605/msg00423.html that he had created a searchable index of the framework mailing list. A great w00t! went up from the crowd and there was much rejoicing. Andi announced (because it was asked) that yes, Zend does have plans to eventually implement a search feature on the mailing lists using (what else?) Zend_Search_Lucene. Until then, thanks Richard.

* James Hartford asked in “zend_form example”:http://www.zend.com/lists/fw-general/200605/msg00453.html if there were any examples or documentation for using Zend_Form. Before wandering off into “Smarty”:http://smarty.php.net -land the general answer was “not yet”. Any volunteers to step up and write a sample? I bet I know where they could get it published and garner untold fame if no fortune. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

* Robert Guerin posted questions about Zend_PDF in “Zend_Pdf”:http://www.zend.com/lists/fw-general/200605/msg00461.html. It didn’t get much discussion but I’m mentioning it here because I haven’t mentioned Zend_PDF lately.

* Daniel Mendes opened a small can of worms when he started “New to the list”:http://www.zend.com/lists/fw-general/200605/msg00502.html. Dan asked several questions but the one that sparked a debate was when he asked which AJAX libraries were being supported by the framework. Andi chimed in quickly that there was a good chance that Dojo would be the library of choice. Someone mentioned Rails and it kinda all slid downhill from there.

* Rob Allen continued his “ZF_Config Proposal Discussion”:http://www.zend.com/lists/fw-general/200605/msg00134.html this week and gave a “pointer to where his code can be downloaded”:http://www.akrabat.com/index.php?s=akrabat_config for those who are wanting to review it. Later in the week, he posted “Zend_Config Proposal version 2″:http://www.zend.com/lists/fw-general/200605/msg00563.html.

* Shekar C Reddy posed a bit of an issue this week with his thread “MySQL 5.1 – Update/Insert logic fails on date-type columns”:http://www.zend.com/lists/fw-general/200605/msg00535.html. It seems that if you put ‘now()’ in an insert it attempts to insert the literal ‘now()’ instead of the timestamp on the server. There was no small amount of discussion on the issue of why you can’t just use PHP’s time() function and Martel Valgoerad eventually declared that it’s not a bug. I’m not sure that declaration actually solved the issue but the thread did eventually die.

p. With that, I’ll wrap it up for this week. Until next week remember, OOP is dangerous, you never know when your gonna slip and break your class. Let’s be careful out there.

p. “=C=”:http://blog.calevans.com