Zend Developer Zone

Continuing with the tutorial series, we will see how to debug the application we created in the #1 series of the tutorials.

In case you missed it, in our first tutorial, we have seen how to structure and code a brand new ZF application to use modules (you can also view that article here)

Debugging include easy to use methods of printing data on the screen, including ZFDebug Toolbar in order to manage all errors and queries, using the logger to log messages to Firebug, using a simple debug function that will place debug messages in your ZFDebug Toolbar, in a special Debug panel, using a redirect debug function in order to see what is happening during your requests, using redirect in a Controller plugin.

In this first article of the series, we will discuss about the best way (in my opinion) to structure your Zend Application in order to have maximum flexibility but also a good defined structure of the classes/files.

These will be a series of tutorials which are meant to show you or guide you through developing a complex application with Zend Framework 1.10.

The series consists of the following parts:

a) Setting up a module based application
b) Setting up helper plugins, methods & debugging with ZFDebug
c) Setting up a login page and signup page with captcha
d) Setting up OpenID to login/create account
e) Setting up an API to create/login an account
f) Improving performance implementing Zend Cache

Schema-less database systems like MongoDB are quickly becoming popular with Web developers on account of their flexibility, simplicity and easy integration with modern Web technologies such as JSON. This article introduces you to MongoDB and shows you how to install it, set up an initial data store, and access it with PHP.

From Mihai Corlan’s blog:

bq. As your projects grow in size and more people get involved you’ll find yourself fixing more and more bugs. When this happens, one of the best friends a developer has is the debugger. In this paper, I’ll talk about some of the workflows and tools you can use to debug Flex and PHP projects.

bq. If you want to try the steps outlined here for yourself, you’ll need Flash Builder 4, a PHP and MySQL server (MAMP or WAMP will do just fine), Eclipse PDT, and XDebug.

It would be a fair statement to say that I have not paid attention to Flash for several years. Obviously I know that those awesome interfaces for movie web sites are made in flash, as are those annoying video ads that start screaming at you as soon as you load up a page, competing with Megadeth on Rhapsody, cranked out on the 700 watts of power I have in my office. But the last time I really looked seriously at Flash was almost a decade ago and I was thrilled at tweening widgets from one place to another. Unfortunately, there's not really any benefit to tweening a text box. Cool? Yes. Practical? No. So I never really picked it up. Plus I was cheap.

That is the reason why I had not really been paying attention to Flash for the past several years. I generally don't look into something if it's cool. I look into something if it is practical. Flash, generally, is meant to be, well, flashy. And it is. But for someone such as myself, I didn't think I had much of a reason to pay attention. Until now…

Quentin Zervaas has written a new article on PhpRiot about using the Zend_Service_Amazon_S3 component of the Zend Framework.

The article discusses how to manage buckets and objects within buckets, as well as how to use Amazon S3 as a Content Delivery Network for your own web sites.

Kevin van Zonneveld has written up a new post for his blog today looking at using Redis in your application for caching information (similar to memcache).

Recently Brandon Savage has been really getting into the Zend Framework and creating applications with it. He, like many other developers just starting out with this framework, has had his share of frustrations. In the latest post to his blog Brandon looks at some of these first steps and what he’s learned from them.

In a new post today Raphael Stolt shows you how to use MongoHq, a cloud-based hosting service, to host a Zend Framework application that uses the MongoDb as a backend. The tutorial focuses on the bootstrapping process to make the framework play nicely with its hosting environment.

There has been a lot of talk over the past several years about the difference between performance and scalability. Never mind that the difference between the two will probably not really affect most developers. Never mind that the “difference between performance and scalability” argument is often used when someone’s code performs poorly and their best argument is “Yeah, but my code scales”. Yeah, sure it does.