phly, boy, phly (Entries tagged as mvc)

A Simple Resource Injector for ZF Action Controllers

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:20:42 -0400

Brandon Savage approached me with an interesting issue regarding ZF bootstrap resources, and accessing them in your action controllers. Basically, he'd like to see any resource initialized by the bootstrap immediately available as simply a public member of his action controller.

So, for instance, if you were using the "DB" resource in your application, your controller could access it via $this->db.

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Module Bootstraps in Zend Framework: Do's and Don'ts

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:55:55 -0500

I see a number of questions regularly about module bootstraps in Zend Framework, and decided it was time to write a post about them finally.

In Zend Framework 1.8.0, we added Zend_Application, which is intended to (a) formalize the bootstrapping process, and (b) make it re-usable. One aspect of it was to allow bootstrapping of individual application modules -- which are discrete collections of controllers, views, and models.

The most common question I get regarding module bootstraps is:

Why are all module bootstraps run on every request, and not just the one for the requested module?

To answer that question, first I need to provide some background.

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Creating Re-Usable Zend_Application Resource Plugins

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:55:12 -0500

In my last article, I wrote about how to get started with Zend_Application, including some information about how to write resource methods, as well as listing available resource plugins. What happens when you need a re-usable resource for which there is no existing plugin shipped? Why, write your own, of course!

All plugins in Zend Framework follow a common pattern. Basically, you group plugins under a common directory, with a common class prefix, and then notify the pluggable class of their location.

For this post, let's consider that you may want a resource plugin to do the following:

Set the view doctype
Set the default page title and title separator

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Model Infrastructure

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 07:35:01 -0500

In the last two entries in this series on models, I covered using forms as input filters and integrating ACLs into models. In this entry, I tackle some potential infrastructure for your models.

The Model is a complex subject. However, it is often boiled down to either a single model class or a full object relational mapping (ORM). I personally have never been much of a fan of ORMs as they tie models to the underlying database structure; I don't always use a database, nor do I want to rely on an ORM solution too heavily on the off-chance that I later need to refactor to use services or another type of persistence store. On the other hand, the model as a single class is typically too simplistic.

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Applying ACLs to Models

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 07:26:40 -0500

In my last post, I discussed using Zend_Form as a combination input filter/value object within your models. In this post, I'll discuss using Access Control Lists (ACLs) as part of your modelling strategy.

ACLs are used to indicate who has access to do what on a given resource. In the paradigm I will put forward, your resource is your model, and the what are the various methods of the model. If you finesse a bit, you'll have "user" objects that act as your who.

Just like with forms, you want to put your ACLs as close to your domain logic as possible; in fact, ACLs are part of your domain.

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Using Zend_Form in Your Models

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 08:30:00 -0500

A number of blog posts have sprung up lately in the Zend Framework community discussing the Model in the Model-View-Controller pattern. Zend Framework has never had a concrete Model class or interface; our stand has been that models are specific to the application, and only the developer can really know what would best suit it.

Many other frameworks tie the Model to data access -- typically via the ActiveRecord pattern or a Table Data Gateway -- which completely ignores the fact that this is tying the Model to the method by which it is persisted. What happens later if you start using memcached? or migrate to an SOA architecture? What if, from the very beginning, your data is coming from a web service? What if you do use a database, but your business logic relies on associations between tables?

While the aforementioned posts do an admirable job of discussing the various issues, they don't necessarily give any concrete approaches a developer can use when creating their models. As such, this will be the first in a series of posts aiming to provide some concrete patterns and techniques you can use when creating your models. The examples will primarily be drawing from Zend Framework components, but should apply equally well to a variety of other frameworks.

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Setting up your Zend_Test test suites

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:00:00 -0400

Now that Zend_Test has shipped, developers are of course asking, "How do I setup my test suite?" Fortunately, after some discussion with my colleagues and a little experimenting on my one, I can answer that now.

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Testing Zend Framework MVC Applications

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:00:00 -0400

Since I originally started hacking on the Zend Framework MVC in the fall of 2006, I've been touting the fact that you can test ZF MVC projects by utilizing the Request and Response objects; indeed, this is what I actually did to test the Front Controller and Dispatcher. However, until recently, there was never an easy way to do so in your userland projects; the default request and response objects make it difficult to easily and quickly setup tests, and the methods introduced into the front controller to make it testable are largely undocumented.

So, one of my ongoing projects the past few months has been to create an infrastructure for functional testing of ZF projects using PHPUnit. This past weekend, I made the final commits that make this functionality feature complete.

The new functionality provides several facets:

Stub test case classes for the HTTP versions of our Request and Response objects, containing methods for setting up the request environment (including setting GET, POST, and COOKIE parameters, HTTP request headers, etc).
Zend_Dom_Query, a class for using CSS selectors (and XPath) to query (X)HTML and XML documents.
PHPUnit constraints that consume Zend_Dom_Query and the Response object to make their comparisons.
A specialized PHPUnit test case that contains functionality for bootstrapping an MVC application, dispatching requests, and a variety of assertions that utilize the above constraints and objects.

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Zend Framework Dojo Integration

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Wed, 21 May 2008 10:57:00 -0400

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:

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Form Decorators Tutorial posted

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Mon, 05 May 2008 10:25:00 -0400

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!

View Helpers Tutorial on DevZone

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 09:51:00 -0400

I have another tutorial in my Zend Framework MVC series up on DevZone today, this time on View Helpers. If you're curious on how to create view helpers, override the standard view helpers, or how some of the standard view helpers such as partials and placeholders work, give it a read!

ZF Plugins Tutorial on DevZone

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 09:22:12 -0400

I'm doing a series of articles on various Zend Framework MVC topics for the Zend Developer Zone. Last week, I covered Action Helpers. This week, I cover Front Controller Plugins. If you've ever been mystified by or curious about this subject, head on over and give it a read!

Action Helpers in ZF

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 10:11:05 -0400

I've posted a new article on Action Helpers in Zend Framework's MVC on the Zend Developer Zone. If you've ever wanted more information on these, follow the link.

DHH on PHP

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:06:14 -0400

Somebody on Twitter pointed this out, and I thought I'd spread the word: DHH of Rails fame has posted a nice, short, and very interesting thought on "The immediacy of PHP".

I've been delving a little into Rails lately myself, and what I find is: use the right tool for the job. For green-field, self-hosted projects, Rails is not a bad choice, and offers a very easy way to get your application up and running quickly. But due to the fact that PHP was built for the web, there are any number of tasks that are simpler and faster to accomplish using it. Evaluate your needs carefully, and choose the tool that best addresses them.

It's nice to see leaders of projects like Rails having this same attitude. It's a breath of fresh air in the competitive market of web development frameworks.

Dojo 1.1.0 Released

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:59:17 -0400

Dojo announced today the availability of 1.1.0.

I've been toying with Dojo off-and-on for almost a year now. It's the most framework-y of the various JS toolkits I've tried, and I particularly appreciate its modularity. (That said, it can lead to a lot of HTTP requests to your site if you don't create a targetted bundle with the modules you need.)

The 1.1.0 release has me pretty excited, as it finally is doing something most other JS frameworks have been doing for some time: its XHR requests now send the "X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest" header, which allows it to conform to the isXmlHttpRequest() method in Zend Framework's request object. This makes it much easier to provide a standard mechanism in your server-side code for detecting AJAX requests, allowing context switching to be automated.