Zend and Symfony are the two frameworks that are often compared. Which one is more functional? Which one is more preferable in terms of productivity? Which one is better for general understanding? Which of these two has a larger community? I've asked Zfort Group experts to help me with these questions, and here's what we have come to.

She first gives a high-level overview of each framework, pointing out a few of the features and tools they have built-in. She then goes on to answer the questions above, noting that she sees Symfony as coming out in the lead. Some of the questions are a little vague, so it's not entirely clear why one is different than the other. What do you think? Leave a comment here with your opinions.

I did an email interview with the folks at PHP Magazin; their German version is here. What follows is our original email exchange in English.

They talked about some of the core principles behind the framework, its origins from the Solar framework, the team's "libraries first, framework second" methods and its push to be a PHP 5.4-focused framework. There's also a bit that compares the framework to two other popular options - Zend Framework and Symfony.

AppFog is quite a popular polyglot PaaS (Platform as a Service) provider and it comes with a generous free plan for the developers. [...] Recently, I was looking for a solution on how to host a Zend Framework based application in AppFog. The main problem was that the url must point to the /public folder inside the app and from there it is initialized. After searching for some time, I found the clue in AppFog's doumentation which is you'll have to redirect all the traffic from the parent domain to the /public/index.php file using the URL rewrite rules.

The rewrite rules are included in the post for easy cut-and-pasting. With the recently announced closing of their phpFog service (in favor of just supporting AppFog) I'm sure this tip could come in handy for a lot of developers out there.

In my previous post I already mentioned Sebastian Jerzy Wilczyński (@dj_sebastian_w) and his uncon session "Unit Testing for Databases using fixtures and phpunit". It made me wonder how much difference it would make if you use fixtures instead of testing database interactions using predefined sets of data. Since I work a lot with Zend Framework I was looking at how I could use fixtures and mock objects to follow Sebastian's guidelines. So I gave it a try. This is what I came up with.

He illustrates with some example code - a set of database data (the fixtures) and sample tests that use the Zend Framework's mapper and table gateway functionality to work with the tables. His test then mocks out the DbTable class for the "Order" object and forces a return of the database fixture data.

ZendServiceManager is usually configured in two places: an array in a config file or a method within your Module class. In either case, you provide a nested array of configuration information. [...] Within the service_manager array, there are a set of nested arrays which are generally used to configure how you want a given class to be instantiated. the names of these sub-arrays are hardcoded, so you just need to learn their names and the difference between them.

He lists out each of the options and includes a brief example and description for each. Values include "invokables", "aliases" and "initializers". He also touches on controllers, view helpers and controller plugins and how they hook into the ServiceManager.

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

So I started thinking that there must be a way to use fixtures for the database the same way as when testing models with PHPUnit Database extension (PHPUnit_Extensions_Database_TestCase). But since PHP does not have multiple inheritance, we can't extend both Zend_Test_PHPUnit_ControllerTestCase and PHPUnit_Extensions_Database_TestCase. So I started out to create a controller test case class that has support for fixtures the same way as the database test case. I mean, how hard can it be?

He dug into the code for the extension and finally came up with a working solution - an abstract class with "_setup" and "_setupDatabase" methods that create what you'll need to perform your tests. A sample test is included in the post to show you it in action.

In this edition I talked with [Matthew Weier O'Phinney @weierophinney], the project Lead of Zend Framework at Zend Technologies Ltd. [...] Matthew has been a speaker at so many PHP conferences and user groups. He also regularly performs and host webinars, the last one (if I'm not wrong) was about ZF2, which I missed out unfortunately. You will find more details about all those presentations on his personal blog here.

In the interview we get answers to things like:

• How he got started with PHP
• When and how he got involved in the community
• Advice to someone new to PHP
• Recommended resources and tools
• and some of his work at Zend and on the Zend Framework

Having worked with ZF1 for a lot of years, I've been watching the development of ZF2 with interest. I've tried nearly every version, from the heady days of the pre-Skeleton App, right through the betas and release candidates. With the imminent release of ZF2 proper, I thought I would share with you some of the most obvious differences between ZF1 and Zf2. Of course, these are only my opinions. While I've contributed (lightly), I've learned most of my ZF2 knowledge from hanging around in IRC and badgering people. If you want to learn quickly and have no remorse for annoying others, you should too!

He covers three of the main differences between the two, namely the namespacing support to replace the awkward class naming, the module-based approach and how bootstrapping is handled. There's a few code snippets tossed in for clarity and a look ahead to the second part for what's to come.

Blue PHP ElePHPant plush toys are so yesterday. Ben Scholzen (you might know him as DASPRiD on IRC/Twitter) is now taking pre-orders for green Zend Framework ElePHPants. Yes, they are green. Yes, they have "ZF" printed on them. No, they are not a repository of Zend Framework knowledge. We tried really hard, but Intel insists that magical toys from the future are not real. Ben needs to reach a minimum production order of 1000 small ZF ElePHPants and is currently hovering at around 200 after the weekend. If you, your user group, or your pet poodle want one of these, visit Ben's pre-order page for more information.

As of the time of this post, the orders for these elePHPants is at about 190 out of the 1000 needed, so if you'd like to pick some up, get over and put in your pre-order now!