We've looked at custom form filters and we've looked at the core form configuration. But what about the other form properties? What about: setting an element as readonly, an element as required, ignoring an element and love them or hate them, what about decorators.

He shows how to update the XML file to add these new attributes into the structure and the resulting form. Also included are a few examples of using decorators to configure the look, feel and modify the attributes.

A lot of developers avoid writing parsers because they think it's pretty hard to do so. Writing an efficient parser for a general purpose language (like PHP, Ruby, Java,...) is hard, but fortunately, most of the time we don't need that much complexity. Typically we just want to parse input coming from config files or from a specific problem domain (expressed through DSLs). DSLs (Domain Specific Languages) are pretty cool, because they allow you to express logic and flow in a very specific and convenient way for a limited set of tasks.

He illustrates with an example based on the Lithium framework's routing engine and how it could parse a text file that relates a route to a controller/action combination. He creates a "Lexer" class that defines a few regular expressions to parse the incoming text strings for matches on things like whitespace, URLs and identifiers (words) and return each in the lexer's output.

In a previous article I showed how you could pass in a fully qualified parameter name into the Dependency Injection Container (DiC) if you needed to be specific about where you need to have something injected. There is an alternate method here that is cleaner than what I did before.

He illustrates with a "Test" class that has a "$test" property and shows how to, using the ZendDi component, inject the class into the container. Using the "injections" configuration value, he uses the "setTest" method to push a value into the "Test" class instance in the "$test" variable.

When you're working with Zend Framework, and code in general, you keep your configuration as much out of code as you can - right? Well, if you want to write maintainable and flexible code you do. Well, if you've been working with Zend Framework and Zend Form for more than a little while, you know that it really makes that pretty simple via Zend_Config - well, some of the time.

The article shows introduces you to some of the common configuration settings of Zend_Form and how those can be set in a configuration to make building the forms simpler. They talk about pre-element and form-wide filters in this first part of the series, including some code/configuration examples.

In my previous post about Dependency Injection Container (DiC) configuration I made mention of some more complicated scenarios that you can use to configure your objects. Not that you need help to make it more complicated. [...] That's why I think this series of blog posts are good. They show you how to get started small which is really the only way to get started if you aren't intimately familiar with a DiC.

He expands on the previous example by adding another method that lets you set up some testing data (injected into the Test class object) and feed in the data via the "parameters" DI container configuration.

In my previous blog post I showed how you could provide parameters to object that you're pulling from a DiC and have them populated in the resulting object. As cool as that is, it's not a massive saving as you need to manually inject the parameters into the DiC. You can often do the same thing by setting up the DiC ahead of time to get the object with those parameters pre-set.

He defines a class (Test) and shows how you can replace the DI container example with a ZendDiConfiguration object that contains the config options. He shows how to use this newly created container to access an instance of this "Test" class.

There are times when you have to make certain features of your PHP application to work asynchronously, and there are times when you do not have to - I will explain this better by introducing every day scenarios.

His two scenarios have a common thread - the need for asynchronous processing, especially for something that can scale as the user base grows. With the help of RabbitMQ he shows you how to install the MW server, get the php-ampq extension for PHP installed and two sample scripts - one to send a message to the broker, the other to receive and parse the result of a job.

Late last week, the Zend Framework community 2.0.0beta3, the latest iteration of the v2 framework. What have we been busy doing the last couple months? In a nutshell, getting dirty with view layers, database abstraction, and configuration.

He covers each topic well, providing code examples for all three - a simple view layer (more here), database abstraction functionality (inserting, selecting and TableGateway) and the configuration changes that allow for things like key translation, section inheritance and constant substitution.

In this past article I've discussed the dependency injection features when using annotations. This time, we'll see how to use the xml and yaml drivers to do the same (setter and constructor injection). If you don't know how to configure the xml and yaml drivers, please start by reading this.

He describes the different injection methods available with the container - setter injection, constructor injection and method injection. Example configuration content is included - both the XML and YAML versions.

Let's say that you install the ZF-Common's User module. By default, it sets up its routes under the /user path segment. [...] This config section will create the routes /user and through the magic of child_routes, also create /user/login and other required routes. If you don't want /user and would prefer /member, then it's easy enough to change. Just add a new config file to the project's config/autoload folder.

Code for the configuration files is included with the update to the "ZendMvcRouterRouteStack" to change the ZF-Common User module's setup to point to "/member" instead of "/user" when routed. You can find out more about the module system in ZF2 in the latest version of the manual.