Martin Sikora has shared some of his experience with setting up a Silex instance to work with Doctrine2 in a new post to his blog. The popular microframework comes with a built-in Doctrine service provider, so integration isn't overly difficult.

Silex is great for its simplicity, however for larger projects you probably want to use some ORM like Doctrine but there's build-in service provider only for Doctrine DBAL and not ORM.

He breaks it up into five smaller steps, each with code samples to help clarify:

• Doctrine 2 ORM Service Provider
• Create your entity classes
• Mind Doctrine DBAL and Doctrine ORM versions
• Doctrine CLI
• Working with Doctrine ORM

In this previous post PHPMaster.com introduced you to the concept of "domain models", structures defining how data should be formatted for consistency. In this second part of the series, Alejandro show show to integrate them with a data access layer (DAL) to make them easier to work with.

The phrase may sound like an cheap cliché, I know, but I'm not particularly interested in reinventing the wheel each time I tackle a software problem (unless I need a nicer and faster wheel, of course). In this case, the situation does warrant some additional effort considering we'll be trying to connect a batch of mapping classes to a blog's domain model. Given the magnitude of the endeavor, the idea is to set up from scratch a basic Data Access Layer (DAL) so that domain objects can easily be persisted in a MySQL database, and in turn, retrieved on request through some generic finders.

He includes all the code you'll need to create a (namespaced) database adapter (PDO), the mapping layer to tie the domain models together and using it all in a practical "blog" example with posts, comments and users.

On DZone.com today Girogio Sironi shares some of his experiences testing out the PHP bindings currently offered to work with Selenium, the web application frontend testing tool that's become a standard over the past few years.

After trying out Selenium 2, it was natural for me to look for its support in PHP code; however, there isn't an official PHP Api distributed on Selenium's website. I tested all the PHP bindings I could find to see which is the best choice today.

He tried out a few different technologies:

• PHPUnit_Selenium
• Facebook's php-webdriver
• the php-webdriver-bindings project
• WebDriver-PHP

The finishes the post with a quick summary for each of the offerings including strengths each has and situations where you might want to use them.

If you're a Zend Studio user and have been wondering how to hook it directly into the phpcloud service from Zend, Kevin Schroeder has posted complete instructions in a new post today (complete with screenshots).

PHPCloud.com is the landing page for our new cloud offering. Using the Zend Application Fabric you can build your applications in the same environment as you will be deploying your apps to. The application is built on my.phpcloud.com and you can then deploy it onto any platform where the Fabric is supported. But how do you get started? Phpcloud.com has been built in a way where you can connect with any IDE. With Zend Studio 9 that connectivity has been built directly in to the IDE.

It's a simple six (well, technically seven) step process that involves setting up a new project, configuring some deployment options and hitting "deploy". Zend Studio makes it super simple to launch your application as many times as you need - a one-click deploy once things are all set up.

As Lukas Smith mentions in his latest post, the Drupal project has made a switch to use the HttpFoundation component of the Symfony2 project as a integral part of their HTTP handling.

[...] The fact that Drupal8 will use Symfony'2 HttpFoundation component is huge, because it will make integration a breeze. Basically Symfony2 converts a Request instance to a Response. So if both Symfony2 and Drupal8 use the same Request and Response classes it means that creating a sub-request and handing the response from Drupal8 into Symfony2 (or vice versa) will require no conversion at all.

He also points out Drupal's use of the ClassLoader component will make integration even easier. This is great news for Symfony fans out there that have been needing to work directly with a Drupal install (or even those wanting to create new Drupal additions in the environment they're familiar with). You'll have to wait for Drupal 8 to get these benefits, though.

On DevShed today there's a new tutorial showing you how to integrate Facebook commenting with your PHP application via the Facebook Connect API.

Facebook comments are a great way to optimize your site for social media and add a level of user-engagement to you site. Quality website comments can increase your website's credibility, as well as its traffic. This tutorial will teach you how to use Facebook's API Connect to integrate comment boxes on your website in a few simple steps, utilizing a little PHP and some elbow grease.

You'll need to set up an application for your PHP app to make the connection. This will give you the unique keys for your application that'll be used in setting up the commenting. By including a Facebook javascript file, all you'll need to do is output a special "fb" HTML tag with the right attributes and a meta tag or two to configure it with your application's keys.

On the Juhana Rasanen's blog today there's a new tutorial showing you how to use the popular NoSQL database MongoDB with an application written in the CodeIgniter framework.

Considering using MongoDB instead of a SQL DB in your next CodeIgniter project? Well, we were and decided to take a stab at it, and fairly soon discovered that it is pretty straightforward. Even more so, if you don't try to use CI Active Record, but use native PHP Mongo interface to store and query your data. That suits our case, as we are planning to access the data mostly from Javascript UI over Ajax - in which case it is quite simple to just get the document from Mongo as an array and then serialize it to the UI using PHP JSON functions.

He talks about his extension of CI_Session to handle the session management and user authentication pulled from the MongoDB and used as normal in your application. He's made the package available for for download if you'd like to see how its implemented (there's a README for installation instructions).

In this new post to his blog Mike Willbanks shows you how you can integrate the Gearman tool (for automating multiple workers to do jobs behind the scenes) into a Zend Framework application, creating a full setup and a sample job.

This article will go into incorporating Gearman workers into Zend Framework (rather a lightweight approach that can and likely should be scaled out) as you work with "Workers". I have implemented these much to be like "Controllers" in the current MVC model, however, they do lack quite a bit of functionality at this point in the process. Basically, they do not support any plugins or action helpers. However, if you are looking for some form of consistency in your Gearman workers, this is a fairly unique approach of getting them incorporated into your application.

He starts with an overview of how things will work - some of the abilities he was looking for in the interface and his solution for having a "supervisor" of the processes in case they might need to be killed off. He includes the code for the different parts of the technique:

• The Worker script itself that checks for Gearman support and creates some basic settings
• A Dispatcher that creates a Gearman worker and executes it
• and a Bootstrap that brings them all together.

He also includes a sample worker script that just executes and echos out a message talking about its current workload.

As is mentioned in this new post to the Zend Developer Zone today, Oracle has released a new article on their Technology Network about getting PHP and Java applications to work together via the Oracle WebLogic Server and Zend Server.

Whether you're experienced in Java, or PHP, or both, the ability to integrate these two development environments together is a "best of both worlds" scenario for enterprise Web application developers. [...] Zend Server, a high-performance, enterprise-ready PHP stack that runs on both Windows and Linux and that comes with a built-in "Java bridge" to connect PHP with JEE applications and services. This article will tell you more, demonstrating just how simple it is to use Zend Server to connect PHP applications with Java classes deployed on Oracle WebLogic middleware.

They talk about the Java bridge that comes with Zend Server - how to install it and make it active - as well as including some code showing how to access a sample Java class via a new Java object. They also show how to access custom Java classes and how to work with an enterprise JavaBeans server.

On DevShed.com today there's a new tutorial about implementing the Asirra CAPTCHA system (from Microsoft) into your application for spam prevention.

Unlike other types of captcha that utilize difficult text obfuscation techniques (such as Google reCaptcha), this system utilizes images of dogs and cats, such as those shown in this screenshot.

They describe some of the reasons to use the system (hard to break, doesn't use sessions, easy to integrate) and how it works. They show how to implement the system on both the server and client side.