The Zend Framework Community has delivered another feature-rich release of Zend Framework and I'm extremely proud and happy to see the energy and excitement around this project. The ZF team (Wil Sinclair, Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Ralph Schindler, Alexander Veremyev) along with many others in the ZF community and at Zend, have been doing a superb job and have been working very hard to put this release together.

He mentions the Dojo integration, the updates to the SOAP component, updates to make test-driven development simpler and a reminder about ZendCon08 coming soon that will feature several Zend Framework-centric talks.

This tutorial will set you through using Zend_Tool to jump-start development on your next ZF MVC application. Zend_Tool is both RAD tools as well as a framework for exposing your own set of tooling needs to the Zend_Tool user interface. While the areas in which extending Zend_Tool are exhaustive, we will focus merely on obtaining and using the current Zend_Tool toolset.

The tutorial walks you through the installation of the component, how to set it up correctly as a "binary" and how to automatically create a new project with a simple "create project" call. He also points out the ability it has to define some of the basic files for actions of your choosing.

The long awaited day has arrived. Zend Framework 1.6 just shipped and with it native support for FirePHP! This means that if you use Zend Framework (ZF) you can now log to your Firebug Console via FirePHP without needing to download any other PHP files such as the FirePHPCore library.

The two new components - Zend_Log_Writer_Firebug and Zend_Db_Profiler_Firebug - are used in the debugging and his tutorial shows you how to get started.

That right, fire up those down-loaders and grab your headlamp and pick-axe. There's fresh code to be had for the taking! You can download Zend Framework 1.6 here Zend Framework Download Page.

Lots of changes made their way into this new release including the Zend_Tool component, built-in pagination, a new CAPTCHA form element, the Zend_File_Transfer component and much more as they also closed over 280 tickets with bugs for this release.

There's also a note about the Zend Framework documentation and how it can now be downloaded from zend.com (free registration required) in a much more portable PDF format.

I'm particularly excited about this webinar, as I've been developing a sample pastebin application to show off a number of features; the webinar will feature some screencasts showing the new code in action, and promises to be much more dynamic than my typical "bullet point and code" presentations.

Be sure to register before hand to get your spot in what will undoubtedly be a popular event.

One of the unit testing best practices suggests to break dependencies, so you can test each component separately. The first problem that arises when you want to test controllers might be having a tighter control over the HTTP Request and Response objects.

This problem is overcome with the Zend_Test_PHPUnit_ControllerTestCase. The second problem it with calls to external resources (like models/databases or web services). This is the prime focus of the post and seceral blocks of code are included to make a class to emulate the HTTP responses you might get back from the service.

We're getting ready to release Zend Framework 1.6.0. However, one important Dijit had to be omitted from the release as I was not able to get it working in time: dijit.Editor.

This dijit is important as it provides an out-of-the-box WYSIWYG editor that you can use with your forms. Unfortunately, actually using it with forms is pretty tricky -- Dojo actually ends up storing content outside the form, which means you need to create a handler that pulls the content into a hidden element when saving.

He includes the code for a sample view helper to implement it and how to include it into your Zend_Form via an addElement call.

One of the 4 Adapters for Zend_Paginator is DbSelect which uses a Zend_Db_Select instance. Now, the problem occurred if I need to have some calculative data from other tables and use join with the Zend_Db_Select object for them.

He gives an example of a join that he performed with the component, the details of the "behind the scenes" code and why it happened that way. He also offers a solution (before the Zend_Pagination component was patched for it, of course) of changing the count() method it uses slightly to remove an unneeded part of the query.

Last week the Belgian PHP User group held their second meeting. Because the venue was fairly close to our office in Vlissingen, some of us decided to have a look. We were early, so there weren't many people yet, but soon the room began to fill up and in the end there were a little over 30 people. Not bad, given that this was only the second meeting.

Talks given covered methods for improving your PHP development (best practices) and a look at the Zend Framework. There were even raffles for fabulous prizes (like copies of "Enterprise PHP Development", elePHPants and a ticket to attend ZendCon this year). Check out the group's website for more information on the next meeting and other bits of info.

One of the most fundamental decision in object design is deciding where to put responsibilities. No one, and I mean no one, gets it right the first time. That's why refactoring is so important. As Kent Beck puts it, refactoring is the process of taking a system and adding to its value, not by changing its behaviour but by giving it more of these qualities that enable us to continue developing at speed.

He follows the "extract" refactoring method that makes things simpler by removing unneeded parts of the code (in favor of an interchangeable external "extract class". He removes seven methods from the class and splits them off into their own. This reduces the controller down to a more manageable size and takes a lot of the complexity out.