Unlike Zend Framework 1, the view layer in Zend Framework 2 separates the variables assigned to each view model. This means that when you are in the layout view script, you don't automatically have access to variables that were assigned the the action's view model and vice versa.

He includes snippets of code with an example controller and a sample view that fetches a value from a child ViewModel instance. He also shows how to access layout and configuration values in the view.

Besides the official documentation and the Quickstart, there are many useful resources for Zend Framework, like blogs and Twitter. I did my best to collect them. If you know something that's not listed here, but should be, please leave a comment and I'll update the post.

He has three categories right now - blogs of well-known developers of the framework and outspoken proponents of it, Twitter users you can follow that talk about/might help with issues that could come up and some of the books that have been published on the topic. There's also an "Other" category with mentions of IRC channels, the ZF wiki and the ZF forum.

The options this time were:

• The trailing '?>' in PHP is Optional
• You can embed other programming languages in PHP
• Objects can be made to look like arrays by using Standard PHP Library
• require is faster than require_once
• Anything Less than 5.1.0 is Silly
• All

Be sure to cast your vote in their latest poll that asks readers that they're really looking for in their frameworks.

While the API for user and group management does form the core of the patUser library, it's not all there is on display. patUser also includes a number of utility functions that can come in handy for certain specialized tasks.

These functions include identifying users and groups by different criteria (such as name or email address); keeping track of the URLs visited by the user so as to generate a user trail; maintaining user account statistics for auditing purposes; and providing exception-handling routines for more graceful error handling.

They give the details on how to:

• make exceptions,
• track the user's history through the site,
• perform a natural selection search on user data,
• how to identify users,
• record stats about the user's activities

With this tutorial they finish off the series, providing a good solid overview of the patUser package. If you're just now reading the series, be sure to check out part one and part two.

They look first at what PHP has to offer, then how it's evolved, and finally a comparison of PHP to several other langauges, including Perl, Java, and Cold Fusion.

Chris Shiflett posted some thoughts on PHP and Ruby on Rails which has generated some interesting discussion. Chris divides programming languages into two categories: Flexible and powerful, Structured and organized.

I prefer to group languages in a different way.

Among the topics to compare the languages under, included are things like garbage collection, interactive or batch, and abstraction. For each, he breaks the category down, describing what it's all about and seperates it into its two components, assigning langauges.]]> Fri, 10 Feb 2006 06:51:19 -0600