By now, you are sure to have heard the news, Zend Framework 1.8 has landed. With ZF 1.8 comes several new features such as Zend_Application, Zend_Navigation, Zend_Tag_Cloud, and, my favorite Zend_Tool. Zend_Tool is not a component in the typical sense. Most components have a class at its top level namespace, Zend_Tool does not. Most components are generally consumed inside your application code to simplify runtime tasks, Zend_Tool does not. Zend_Tool is more akin to a framework than a component – a framework within a framework. […]

A look into managing external dependencies in your web applications and how you can defend against external services bringing your site down. Simple code and schema provided that will allow you to automatically monitor, shut off and bring back to life external services that may damage your site. […]

As you probably know by now, March 24th is Ada Lovelace day. Simply put: the day to put a little spotlight on the female tech colleague you admire most. Without the risk of looking like a suck-up, you can turn your whole blog into an ode to that someone special on your team. The idea is to write about only one person, but there we run into my main weak point: you have to pick your favorite. After thinking long and hard, I decided I just knew too many women who would deserve an ode. In this post, I'll bend the rules a bit, and instead of one full post about one woman, I write a small section about every woman I know in the PHP community. Where known, I've added a link to their blogs, and if you google around a bit, I'm sure you can find a full 'Ada' post about each and every one of them. Since I can't choose which I like most, I will instead order them alphabetically. This is definitely not a complete list, but just the ones that keep the highest profiles in the PHP Community […]

For those people who have ever used mysqldump to backup a database, you may have seen all sorts of weird comments like /*!40101 SET NAMES utf8 */; or /*!40000 ALTER TABLE `members` DISABLE KEYS */; — Ever wonder what those mean and how you might use them? Read on to find out. […]

I attended the 2009 DrupalCon in Washington DC this year, and was extremely impressed by the conference and the Drupal Community in general. I’ll admit that I’ve never used Drupal, though always had a number of friends who used it regularly. So I was attending as an ‘outsider’ to so speak, not knowing the lingo nor how that community differed from the more general PHP community. […]

oDesk, the Marketplace for Online Workteams, is both a marketplace for software projects that need to get done (buyers) and for programmers and software development shops with the skills to complete them (providers). oDesk has recently set up a groups feature and Zend Certified Engineers is one of their groups which require verification of eligibility in order to join. Let's take a look at oDesk and what they provide for both of their constituencies (buyers and providers) and why PHP programmers might find oDesk and ZCE status of interest... […]

Zend Platform on IBM I provides many benefits including monitoring and advanced debugging. One of the many key features of Zend Platform is caching. In a nutshell, Zend Platform caches PHP scripts and content in a byte-code format to improve performance. This is an extremely useful feature, especially when you start exploring frameworks like Zend Framework or Cake. Zend Platform has many dials and controls which affect caching on the IBM i. We are going to explore how a few of them work and shed some light on their purpose. […]

I have run into a few situations recently that made me think about when and why I would fire a contracting organization (assuming they did not resolve the issue immediately). Obviously there are exceptions, so use some common sense. But do not let an abusive relationship form where you will always come out as the loser. […]

Scaling. The Final Frontier. Or is it? All too often scaling is left until the day it is needed causing havoc to a business model that was ready to succeed. There is nothing like the sound of crushed hopes and dreams during an outage caused by good press. Jayson Minard has had enough and wants development teams to stand up and take notice that scaling isn't something that should wait, that it isn't something to some day tune, but that it is a daily practice, a lifestyle, the culture of your development team. Hear him rant while laying down a few tips of how you can scale day-by-day. […]

At first, refactoring seemed to me to be magic, over the years I have come to view it as more of a trick, and today refactoring is integrated into my development environment and used frequently and quickly. Using the refactoring functionality, in addition to other tools, I can sculpt the code to improve legibility and maintainability. In this article I will present refactoring’s strengths, and then argue that PHP developers and framework designers should immediately adopt refactoring’s capabilities. Refactoring, together with other important tools, has resulted in PHP catching up with other languages that stress scalability, for Web applications and Web services enterprise applications. […]