Get To Business.

After another hang up from Zend Studio for Eclipse (the IDE formerly known as Zend Studio) in which about 10 minutes of unsaved work was lost, I threw in the towel and went back to good old Zend Studio 5.5. For those not in the know (ie, You The Reader), Zend Studio is a line of development software for PHP from Zend. Having recently revamped their product to combine it with an eclipse project named PDT (PHP Development Tools), they created what would appear to be better but is ultimately inferior product.

Having used Studio for Eclipse for over two months religiously (~10 hours a day) you could say I have gotten pretty used to it. However, there is no getting past the hangups, which are not acceptable for a professional developer.

Firing up the old Studio 5.5, I was shocked on the apparent difference in responsiveness. I was so used to Studio for Eclipse that I forget how much faster the old 5.5 handles.

No more will I see the dreaded ‘Building PHP projects: 0%’ hoping it will not hang yet again.. especially when I hit the save button only to find out it has been queued behind that cursed process (which of course, will never finish… forcing a manual shutdown and loss of code).

Zend Studio for Eclipse has some nice ideas - like a code analyzer and an integrated unit-testing with code coverage statistics. Too bad those features which sound great in theory are the downfall of this software product - it is the code analyzer that seems to be a big reason for the build process hangs (in response to a support ticket I posted to Zend, I was instructed by a support employee to turn off code analyzing.. It’s great to know that they are aware of the instability of this feature. However the Studio continued to hang up). And I spent several days (!) trying to make my unit-tests run from inside the IDE (ultimately failing despite some small successes).
You can say many things about me, but when it comes to making computer related things GO, I am your guy. The fact that I could not make Studio for Eclipse run the tests… Goes a long way for me as indication for the maturity of this software product.

If you are a PHP developer considering the move to eclipse, my advice is give this one a pass. At least until it matures enough to be a worthy replacement to the old Studio 5.5.

Needs to come up with better excuses

The standards and requirements of web-based user interfaces have steadily risen in recent years, and heavy use of Javascript and sometimes AJAX is almost unavoidable in modern day web applications. However, developing with Javascript could be similar to pulling teeth - There’s a lot of bleeding and the pain won’t go away for several days (Incidentally, I had a tooth pulled out recently).

Javascript, unlike server-side languages such as PHP, are parsed by the browser, and is browser-dependent in its functionality and debugging process. As fate would have it, all browsers differ from each other in their implementations of Javascript parsing, often times even diverging on different versions of the same browser. And of course, there is also Internet Explorer, whose vile and unspeakable acts of Javascript terror are only surpassed by its level of adherence to Css standards.

For basic usage, plain old Javascript can still make do and create simple user-interface interactions. But when the user-interface requirements are high, and Javascript deployment is massive, other alternatives might be considered.
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[This is part three of a three part review. Part one can be found here and part two here]

In previous parts I’ve covered some of the main components of the Zend Framework, including database abstraction and the Model-View-Controller pattern for separation of logic from presentation.

This time I will go over some of the smaller modules in terms of scope, yet still some of the more important and useful in my opinion.

Zend Filter and Zend Validate - Data validation and filtering

Validation and filtering of information are integral parts of a dynamic website operations. User generated input (received usually via a GET or POST request, e.g from an HTML form or a URL address), should be treated with caution. The input should be filtered as to not contain harmful data (see: SQL injection attacks) and validated to ensure it is what it should be - for example, in the case of HTML forms checks are made to ensure that all required fields are filled out and contain the expected type of data.

Filtering and validating is a common procedure for web developers, so naturally the Zend Framework includes components to handle such tasks. Those components are the Zend_Filter and Zend_Validate class hierarchies.

The base classes are of Zend_Filter and Zend_Validate are extended by specific filters and validators, each implementing a filter() or validate() method accordingly. The filters/validators class names are self-explanatory, for example Zend_Validator_NotEmpty checks that a variable is not empty, and Zend_Filter_HtmlEntities uses the htmlentities PHP function to filter a string.
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[This is Part two of a three part review. Part one can be found here]

When I wrote the previous part of this review, covering the Registry and Database classes of the Zend Framework, the Framework was still at version 0.9.3 Beta. It has since reached version 1.0.0 Release Candidate, and interestingly enough, most of the changes affect the components I’ll be reviewing this time.

Zend_Controller, Zend_View - Model-View-Controller architecture

A Model-View-Controller implementation seems to be all the rage these days in web-development, and for good reason (though some wonder whether it realy is so). Briefly on the Model-View-Controller pattern - In a (web) application of growing complexity, it becomes paramount to separate logic from the presentational layer, allowing logic to be changed without requiring change in the presentational layer. Anyone who has developed for web in a straightforward manner, mixing client side code (e.g PHP) and presentational code (HTML, CSS), probably has noticed an increasing difficulty in making changes to a script as it grows in size and complexity.
In a manner of speaking, Style Sheets apply the same logic behind the MVC pattern - allowing separation of information from styling, and for reusability of styling code (Style Sheets). For more on the MVC pattern read the Wikipedia page or this article on PHPwact.

The Zend Framework provides the View and Controller parts of the MVC scheme, with the Model layer provided by the web developer according to the needs of a specific web-development project. Most models involve database access, and the Zend_Db_Table provides the building blocks for such models as I’ve mentioned in Part 1.
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[Note: Due to its length, this review has been split up in three. This is Part 1 of a three part review, Part 2 can be found here]

A software framework is a reusable design for a software system (or subsystem) [quote: Wikipedia on Software Framework].

The Zend Framework is a software framework written in PHP and aimed to provide useful and reuseable solutions to (mostly) common web-development issues.
Zend is the company behind the PHP engine, which makes it especially qualified for creating such a framework, all of the developers involved in the Zend Framework project being current/past web-developers with a rich background in the web environment.

While there are many other PHP frameworks available at varying levels of maturity and stability, we chose the Zend Framework for reasons I will elaborate later on. Some of the more prolific PHP frameworks available are CakePHP, Symphony and Prado. For a more comprehensive list, check out this Wikipedia entry and this article on PHPit

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