In this edition I talked with Rob Allen who is the main author of the famous PHP book "Zend Framework in Action". He is very passionate about the whole Zend stuffs: he's a contributor to the Zend_Config component in Zend Framework 1, he's a member of the Zend Framework Education Advisory Board, he keeps on with his contributions with the new Zend Framework 2 and he rambles a lot about QUALITY Zend Framework tutorials on his blog. Rob is fond of writing; his latest PHP-Advent article is "Better Than the Rest" and is also a regular conference speaker, speaking at the likes of ZendCon, PHP North West, PHP|Tek and a whole lots of places.

In the interview Rob answers questions about:

• How he got started with PHP
• His advice to beginning PHP developers and ones looking to improve themselves
• Who he works (IDE, debugging, testing)
• Some recommended resources to learning and keeping up to date
• and some of his thoughts about conferences

Often referenced by a few other fancy names, the substitute is generically called a virtual proxy, a sort of stand-in that exploits the neatness of Polymorphism and interacts with the actual domain objects. Proxies aren't new to PHP. Doctrine and Zend Framework 2.x make use of them, although with different aims. On behalf of a didactic cause, however, it would be pretty instructive to implement some custom proxy classes and use them for lazy-loading a few basic aggregates from the database, this way illustrating how virtual proxies do their stuff under the hood.

He starts off by setting up a domain model for a "Post" and "Author" - a typical blog example.Based on the definition of these classes, he creates a mapper class to generate Author objects and an "AuthorProxy" class that uses a "loadAuthor" method to only load in the author's details when a property is requested. He gives a bit more code showing it in action and the difference between using the normal Author and AuthorProxy class.

In this 10 part series, I'm going to take you through the basics of PHP and hopefully give you a taste of what such a versatile language can do. I am not, however, going to preach that PHP is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I'll let you decide that for yourself!

He introduces himself first, talking about some of his past experience with PHP and other various languages. He then goes on to talk about where PHP came from, a high-level look at how it works in both the web and command-line environments.

We have decided to give people the chance to write tutorials and blog posts for PHP Freaks. [...] You'll be writing about things that are of general interest to PHP developers and you will be writing tutorials for people who are learning about PHP at any level (i.e. from beginner tutorials to advanced topics). We would rather have tutorials that teach programming/coding concepts or theory than specific things, such as a blog.

You'll need to request membership and join the "Authors" group to get started. Check out their list of other criteria you'll need to match too.

Co-author of Pro Drupal Development Matt Westgate will be giving a live webinar on how to customize Drupal themes. The webinar is slated for September 9 at 7pm GMT, so mark your calendars!

You can find out more information about the webinar on the Groups.Drupal website.

Included in the happenings he mentions were the talk that Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone gave on mashups, Kevin Henney's look at Object Orientation, and Rasmus Lerdorf's look at PHP5 performance/security. He also mentions meeting up with Dagfinn Reiersol (author of PHP in Action) to "talk shop" a bit about writing books.

You can check out all of the details about the conference that was over on their website including summaries of the talks that were given during this jam-packed one day event.

The new Zend Certification Study Guide is out and the initial reviews look good. Since this was a topic of interest to me (mainly because I've yet to take the test) I decided to dig a little deeper. I fired up my recorder and called Davey Shafik and Ben Ramsey, the authors of the new guide, to talk to them. Here to give you a little of the back story is our conversation.

They talk about:

• the release of the book
• some of the contents of the chapters (including the sample chapter on security)
• Davey's experience with the exam/Ben's use of his PHP4 certification in his work
• and the practice tests that php|architect is offering to get developers prepared.
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