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

We had our Zend Framework/Dojo integration QA today. Aside from some connectivity issues at the beginning of the presentation, things went smoothly, and there were some good questions.

A number of people reported missing the slides or that the slides were not advancing. I'm posting them here; they will also be available on the Zend.com webinars page later this week.

ZendFramework_Dojo.ppt

Update: For those who want to view online, you can now do so at SlideShare.

If you've found that your SVN checkouts or svn:externals of Zend Framework are not working currently, then you missed the announcements on fw-general and #zftalk; I've just completed a Subversion Reorganization that is part of our new proposal process and 'Extras' offering. Please follow the link for details on how to update your installs.

I'm pleased to announce that Zend Framework will be partnering with Dojo Toolkit to deliver out-of-the-box Ajax and rich user interfaces for sites developed in Zend Framework.

First off, for those ZF users who are using other Javascript toolkits: Zend Framework will continue to be basically JS toolkit agnostic. You will still be able to use whatever toolkit you want with ZF applications. ZF will simply be shipping Dojo so that users have a toolkit by default. Several points of integration have been defined, and my hope is that these can be used as a blueprint for community contributions relating to other javascript frameworks. In the meantime, developers choosing to use Dojo will have a rich set of components and integration points to work with.

The integration points we have defined for our initial release are as follows:

I've known for some time, but was reluctant to blog about it until the plane tickets were purchased and in hand: I've been invited to speak at the Dutch PHP Conference this coming June:

I'll be presenting two separate sessions: an all day tutorial on 13 June 2008 covering Zend Framework, and a regular session on 14 June 2008 covering Best Practices for PHP development, which will focus on how to utilize Zend Framework coding standards and methodologies to help deliver efficient, high quality code for your organization.

I'm looking forward to meeting old and new friends alike at the conference!

My good friend, Rob, hosts my site for me, in return for helping with server maintenance. After being on Gentoo for the past three years, though, we decided it was time to switch to something a little easier to maintain, so last night we wiped the system partitions and installed Ubuntu server.

I'll say this: the setup is much faster! However, we had a few gotchas that surprised us -- it didn't setup our RAID array out-of-the-box, which led to a good hour of frustration as we tried to verify that the install wouldn't wipe it, and then to verify that we could re-assemble it. (We succeeded.) Additionally, we second-guessed a few things we shouldn't have, which led to needing to back out and reconfigure. But what was over a 12 hour install with Gentoo we accomplished in a matter of a few hours with Ubuntu server -- so it was a huge success that way.

Unfortunately, our mysqldump of all databases... wasn't, a fact we discovered only after importing it into the new system. I ended up losing my blog database and PEAR channel database. Fortunately, the PEAR channel has not changed at all in the past year, so we had an old backup that worked, and I had a snapshot of my blog database from three weeks ago I was able to use. As a result, there are a few missing entries, but for the most part, all works. If you commented on one of those missing entries, my apologies.

Now that the install is done, I'm also finalizing some design changes to my blog -- it's time to leave the black and white for more colorful grounds. Look for a revamp in the coming weeks!

As a continuing part of my MVC series, I've posted a new article on Form Decorators up on the DevZone.

I'm hoping this will be the definitive guide to using form decorators. I cover the design decisions behind them, basics of operation, how to customize output by mixing and matching standard decorators, and how to create your own custom decorators. Among the examples are how to create a table-based layout for your forms (instead of the dynamic list layout used by default), and how to use a View Script as your form decorator in order to have full control over your form layout.

So, if you've been playing with Zend_Form and having trouble wrapping your head around decorators, give it a read!