On the Liip blog today, there's a quick post about integrating Symfony2 and Magento, the popular PHP-based ecommerce platform.

So last week four developers sat together on a regular Hackday to see what's needed to hook up Magento into Symfony. To make this short the outcome is a Magento bundle for Symfony2. When we met in the morning we weren't even sure what exactly to try out but soon agreed on implementing a Symfony authentication which uses the Magento customer database.

The post talks about some of the issues they came across in their work - mainly a problem with incompatible autoloaders. There were also problems getting the logins to play nicely with each other and each product's session handling. You can find the current results from their hacking in this bundle posted to github.

In a new post Matthew Weier O'Phinney talks about autoloaders in the Zend Framework and the changes they've made from ZF1 to ZF2. He also includes a link to a package you can try out if you'd like to backport the ZF2 autoloaders to your ZF1 application.

Interestingly, I've had quite some number of folks ask if they can use the new autoloaders in their Zend Framework 1 development. The short answer is "yes," assuming you're running PHP 5.3 already. If not, however, until today, the answer has been "no." I've recently backported the ZF2 autoloaders to PHP 5.2, and posted them on GitHub [tarball here].

His autoloader backport scripts include a class map generation tool, a PSR-0 compliant autoloader, a class map autoloader and an autoloader factory for loading multple strategies at once. He also includes a sample of how to use it with a bit of the output it might give you for your project.

In his latest post Volker looks at something he sees more and more projected implementing as a simple way to not have to manually define paths all over their applications - creating autoloaders. His post shows how to create one such autoloader for a legacy, non-framework type of project.

The first argument usually is "ease of use". It can get pretty annoying when you have to clutter your whole application with "require this file here and that file over there" statements. [...] The main motivation for autoloading usually is "getting rid of all the require statements and the problems resulting from forgetting one at one point where you don't notice it because on your machine it worked.

In some projects you're lucky enough to have class name to file name mapping to make it simpler. His project didn't have that, so he needed a way around it. His answer came in the PHP Autoload Builder tool - a handy command line script that works through your code and builds an index of sorts you can refer to for the correct class-to-file map.

Earlier this month Rafael Dohms posted a new article to his blog looking at a feature of PHP it seems not every developer knows about - the Standard PHP Library (or SPL).

By a show of hands, how many people here ever heard of SPL? How many already used it? Chances are most of you didn't raise your hands, and some might even have a confused look on their faces. Indeed that is the sad reality when it comes to SPL, but What is SPL?

He goes on to look at a few different things the SPL has to offer like autoloader overloading, iterators (with an included list of 21 of them) and the SplFixedArray that can be used to help speed up array access and manipulation.

This new post on the ServerGrove blog today looks at using the updated Zend_Loader component of the Zend Framework from inside a Symfony application.

Zend Framework 1.8.0 was released yesterday and if you are using it within a Symfony project, you need to know something: Starting on 1.8.0 Zend_Load::autoload() is deprecated and will be removed on 2.0.0.

With the updated loader, if you'd like to use it inside Symfony, you need to change the function you're using to autoload via a call to spl_autoload_register. Point this at the Zend Framework code and you should be good to go.

PHPRiot has started up a new series looking to introduce you to the Zend Framework one piece at a time. In this first article n the series Quentin Zervaas looks at one of the first components any Zend Framework-based application hits - Zend_Loader.

In this article I will introduce you to Zend_Loader, a Zend Framework class used to automatically load other classes. Typically you would use include_once() or require_once() when you want to load a class but using Zend_Loader you don't have to.

He talks some about how it works, how to enable an disable it and how you can replace it with your own custom autoloader if you want. He gives an example of doing this, overriding the loader with a call to registerAutoload to register his autoloader class.