Phly, boy, phly
the weblog and site of Matthew Weier O'Phinney

The Burlington PHP User Group is having another meeting tonight at 5:30pm at Brown & Jenkins Coffee Roasters. From the announcement:

Bradley Holt will be giving a presentation on developing a web application using Zend Framework. Bradley Holt is founder and web developer for Found Line, a local design and development studio which has used Zend Framework in several recent projects. He also works as a software developer for a local non-profit. Before starting Found Line he worked as computer trainer teaching a variety of subjects including Java/JSP, ASP.NET, and PHP

Visit the meeting page for details on location and RSVPs. If you're in the Burlington, VT, area, we'd love to see you there!

In an effort to debug issues on a cluster, I was trying to determine which machine on the cluster was causing the issue. My idea was that I could insert a header token identifying the server.

My first idea was to add the directive 'Header add X-Server-Ip "%{SERVER_ADDR}e" in my httpd.conf. However, due to the nature of our load balancer, Apache was somehow resolving this to the load balancer IP address on all machines of the cluster -- which was really, really not useful.

I finally stumbled on a good solution, however: you can set environment variables in apachectl, and then pass them into the Apache environment using the PassEnv directive from mod_env; once that's done, you can use the environment variable anywhere.

In my apachectl, I added the line "export HOSTNAME=`hostname`". Then, in my httpd.conf, I added first the line "PassEnv HOSTNAME", followed by the directive 'Header add X-Server-Name "%{HOSTNAME}e"'. Voila! I now had the hostname in the header, which gave me the information I needed for debugging.

I've spent the last couple months gathering requirements for the Zend_Form component, building a prototype, creating a composite proposal based on existing proposals and my research, gathering community feedback, and, finally coding the implementation. It's a testament to the value of Test Driven Development that I now have 302 unit tests passing covering the codebase... all in just over a week's time.

So, if you're interested in Zend_Form, now is the time to start testing it. You can grab it from subversion, where you'll find it in the incubator. You can find preliminary documentation on the Framework wiki.

Tags: zendframework, php, zend_form

2007 was a busy year, both personally and professionally. I won't go into the personal too much, because, well, it's personal, and some of the details are simply inappropriate for blogging material.

Here's the short version:

• One trip to Belgium and The Netherlands.
• Two trips to Israel.
• Two trips to Atlanta, GA (not counting the return trip from Europe, when I was stranded for a day due to storms in the Northeast).
• Three different user groups attended, with three presentations.
• One major Zend Framework release
• One PEAR release.
• One podcast.
• One webinar.
• One book published.
• One conference attended.

What follows is my month-by-month breakdown: