Tuesday, December 2. 2008

Tidings of the Season

Just about every day, I have an idea for a blog post, and most days, by the end of the day, I just don't have the time or energy to actually write anything up. The inner writer in me screams, "no excuses!" while the aging adult in me whispers, "time for bed, dear."

So, to keep my hand in the game, here are a few things running through my head, or that I'm working on, or that I'll be doing soon.

Speaking at PHP Quebec

PHP Quebec 2009

I'm speaking at PHP Quebec this coming spring, and presenting "Practical Zend Framework Jutsu with Dojo". I will be reworking the talk I did at php|works to present new features and new techniques I've been working on for effectively using Dojo and Zend Framework together. Hopefully my laptop and the projector will play nice together this time!

PHP Advent Calendar

Chris Shiflett and Sean Coates have generously donated some time and a domain to this year's PHP Advent Calendar. I was invited to submit an entry, and wrote up a piece I titled "Use Responsibly," where I discuss good development habits when consuming open source projects.

Burlington, VT PHP User's Group

This week marks the one year anniversary of regular meetings of the Burlington, VT PHP User's Group. We meet this week for a special presentation from Josh Sled of Sun Microsystems, on database indexing, joins and subqueries, database optimization, and more. If you're in the area Thursday evening, come join us!

Zend Framework 1.7.1

Yesterday, we released Zend Framework 1.7.1, the first bugfix release in the 1.7 series. Not much more to say about it, other than start downloading!

Pastebin updates

I've been continuing development on the pastebin application I developed for demonstrating Zend Framework and Dojo integration. In the past couple weeks, I've reworked it substantially, adding support for dojo.back so as to stay in the same page while utilizing the application; the results are quite good. One side effect of this is that I've reworked and simplified the view scripts, and added REST, JSON-RPC, and XML-RPC endpoints to simplify the XHR infrastructure. I'm getting pretty happy with the results...

...which has led me to jump to the next milestone, which is to integrate the bug application I worked up for the Dutch PHP Conference last summer and start creating a suite of collaborative developer tools. These are intended to do three things: (1) demonstrate best practices and good architecture when using Zend Framework, (2) demonstrate appropriate techniques when using Dojo with Zend Framework, and (3) to scratch an itch (I'd like to use these tools for my personal projects). I've code named the project "Spindle", a name I like for its rich connotations. If you're interested in contributing, drop me a line, and I'll set you up with commit access. Or fork it, and send me patches. Whatever.

Oh, and one more thing...

Ha! fooled you!

Seriously, though, there are, to quote something I saw on twitter today, a "metric shit-ton" of holidays and observances of just about every faith and geographic origin in the coming month. Enjoy, and best tidings of the season to you!

Posted by Matthew Weier O'Phinney in Dojo, PHP at 22:07 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)
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Related entries by tags:
Speaking at php|tek
Creating composite elements
Speaking at DPC (again!)
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Zend Framework 1.8 PREVIEW Release

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happy holidays to you too matt! thanks for the work on zf, i'm a huge fan!
#1 Paul (Link) on 2008-12-02 22:21 (Reply)
Thank you very much for your work on the bug application, in particular your motivations for doing so.

I've read through the code and learned quite a bit. It looks like I'll be starting my next app using it as a template for organization. I found your refactoring changes to fit current best practices especially helpful. A number of things about the Zend Framework are starting to make more sense.

I hope you please keep working on it. I think being able to see a reasonably complete application that are known follow best practices is invaluable for learning ZF. Too many of the tutorials I've read are incomplete.

Thanks & Happy Holidays,
--Rob
#2 Rob T. on 2008-12-06 15:08 (Reply)
No worries -- I'm actively developing it, for the reasons stated in this post, as well as a few others I don't feel like divulging quite yet. I plan to use it as a springboard to some tutorials and articles on site architecture -- it's always easier to write those when you already have example code.

I'm glad you find it useful. Keep an eye on the bugapp branch of the pastebin app -- I'm developing there currently, and will only merge the changes to the master branch once I have finished integration.
#2.1 Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Link) on 2008-12-06 18:48 (Reply)
Wow, the PHP calendar is really cool =)
#3 Álvaro G. Vicario (Link) on 2008-12-06 17:14 (Reply)
Thank you for the good additional documentation end explanation of so much fields of Zend Framework which are hardly to find in the official documentation. Your bug app is one of these as it presents a clean and functional example on how to separate data storage from the models.
Of course I know the big Zend "do at will" motto but as performance of ZF is critical argument against one question:
The bug app makes use of a lot view helpers. Till now I was using the partials (-loops) allot for the same job but I think to remember you (someone else) recommend to avoid them if possible cause of performance reasons. Is this the reason you prefer view helpers? If so, is there still any use case for partials?
#4 Christian on 2009-01-20 14:58 (Reply)
I see many people using partial() and partialLoop() incorrectly. You should use these in only two situations: 1) you need to limit variable scope and pass in your variables explicitly, 2) you need to use a view script in another module, and cannot count on it being in the view script paths.

In most cases, render() is sufficient, or looping over a render() call. Or, as you noted, a targetted view helper for a specific task.

I use view helpers heavily for a variety of reasons. One is to allow access (read-only, or course!) to models that may not be injected to the view. Another is to encapsulate specific, repeatable logic. Many use partials for this, but I prefer to be explicit.
#4.1 Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Link) on 2009-01-20 15:33 (Reply)

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