IBM Continues with "Understanding the Zend Framework" Series

For those of you not paying attention, IBM has been quietly releasing new installments in it’s “Understanding the Zend Framework” series. The series of tutorials is now in it’s 6th installment and the feed reader that readers are building is really beginning to take shape.

The series, written in part by Nicholas Chase, Tracy Peterson, Gina Deol, and Tyler Anderson, walks the reader through building a Feed Reader using PHP 5 and the Zend Framework. While there are other great tutorials on the web for using the Zend Framework, this is by far the most detailed.

We covered the release of Part 1 back in June. Since then Nicolas has been joined by friends who have helped flesh out the tutorial and the sample application. Here’s a quick run-down of the pieces available so far.

• Part 1: The basics
• Part 2: Model-View-Controller
• Part 3: The feeds
• Part 4: When there is no feed, the Zend_HTTP_Client
• Part 5: Creating PDF files
• Part 6: Sending e-mail

Wow, they’ve really exercised the framework. Throw in a chapter on indexing feeds and they can stick a fork in it.

Seriously though, this is a great series of articles. Sure the sample application is contrived but all the really good ones are. In the end though, you come out with an application that works and the knowledge of how it works. It’s that second part that’s the most valuable.

Looking forward, they give us the details of where the tutorial is headed.

In Part 7, we look at searching saved content and returning ranked results. In Part 8, we create our own mashup, adding information from Amazon, Flickr, and Yahoo! And in Part 9, we add Ajax interactions to the site using JavaScript object notation.

Looks like it’s going to be a fun trip. (And what would a web tutorial be without “HelloWorld 2.0”, a Flickr Feed app!) Thank you to Nicholas and all his friends that worked on this tutorial. I look forward to reading the rest of the series.

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