Every once in a while, I get the urge to clean up my development environment, reinstalling everything from the operating system on down just to experience the good vibes that come with a squeaky-clean (and super-snappy) system. Having read about the new Zend Server Community Edition, I decided that instead of the usual procedure I follow to reinstall my PHP environment, I’d give the new one-click installer a try and see if it saved me some time. It worked out pretty well, and over the next few pages, I’m going to tell you what I did and guide you through the process of installing and using the application for your own development. And I’ll also show you how simple it is to install and use PHP/MySQL applications under Zend Server CE, with a live demonstration using an off-the-shelf CMS. […]

As of version 1.7, Zend Framework includes an extension for native Adobe Action Message Format (AMF) communication between Adobe Flash Platform applications and PHP. The Zend Framework includes extensions for a vast array of common programming tasks, including database connectivity and abstraction, e-mail, authentication, and third-party application programming interface (API) access. Most of these are useful in Flex applications, and with Zend_Amf, leveraging them has never been easier. In this article, you create a Flex application that takes advantage of some useful Zend Framework extensions. […]

Ever since the big search engines added auto-suggest, hardly a week goes by without a client asking me to build similar autocomplete functionality into a Web form. Fortunately, modern programming toolkits like Dojo provide ready-made widgets that have the necessary client-side functions for autocomplete. Add a little bit of server-side glue, in the form of a PHP script that talks to a database to generate valid suggestions, and enabling this functionality in a Web application now becomes a matter of hours, rather than days. In this article, I’ll show you how to do this using three different libraries: PEAR HTML_QuickForm, YUI, and Dojo. Come on in, and find out more! […]

So, now you have seen how to add commands to the zf tooling system. But what if you want to interact with a "Project". I guess the bigger question to answer is, what is a "Project"? In general, a "project" is a planned endeavor or an initiative. In the computer world, projects generally are a collection of resources. These resources can be files, directories, databases, schemas, images, styles, and more. […]

By now, you have probably read the earlier article on getting Zend_Tool installed and working on your development machine... (or at least you should have!) And you might have casually played with it, or perhaps you are using it to create the general scaffold for your ZF MVC based projects. Either way, at some point you are bound to ask the question "how do I extend Zend_Tool?" […]

This tutorial will set you through using Zend_Tool to jump-start development on your next ZF MVC application. Zend_Tool is both RAD tools as well as a framework for exposing your own set of tooling needs to the Zend_Tool user interface. While the areas in which extending Zend_Tool are exhaustive, we will focus merely on obtaining and using the current Zend_Tool toolset. This article has been published on DevZone before, but is now completely updated to the latest versions. […]

You’ve already seen, in previous articles, just how easy it is to read and write Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with PHP and PEAR. But spreadsheets are just one way of representing structured data – the other, of course, is to use a database. Well, guess what? If your database happens to be Microsoft Access, PHP has you covered there as well! In this article, I’ll introduce you to PHP’s MDBTools extension, which provides an API to programmatically read data from Microsoft Access database files. If your project involves working with such files, extracting database records either for calculations or for conversion to other formats, you’ll find this extension invaluable. Come on in, and see how it works! […]

When it comes to working with different file formats, PHP is like a Swiss Army knife: it has a tool to handle almost anything you can throw at it. JPEG images, XML files, Word documents, ZIP archives…you name it, and there’s a PHP extension to handle it! This incredible versatility also applies to the topic of today’s article: the PDF, or Portable Document Format. Not content with just one, PHP actually comes with two different extensions that allow developers to dynamically generate PDF documents: the PDFlib extension, and the libHaru extension. Over the next few pages, I’m going to take a quick look at the Haru extension, providing you with a brief overview of its functions and demonstrating how you can use it in your PHP development. So come on it, and let’s get going! […]

Let’s take a look at two extensions can help you organize and catalog your digital media collection so that it’s easier to navigate and search. […]

When it comes to dealing with different file formats, it’s hard to faze PHP. XML documents, PDF files, JPEG images, MP3 media…you name it and, chances are, there’s a PHP extension to handle it. And so it is with compression formats like RAR, LZF and Bzip2 – although these archive formats are far less common today than the ubiquitous TAR and ZIP formats, they are still actively used by many applications and projects, and continue to be supported in PHP via PECL extensions. […]