Benjamin Eberlei has a new post to his blog today pointing you to some PHP & Hudson CI integration resources that can help you get this powerful combination up and running for your deployment process.

Although phpUnderControl is the most wide-spread, but from I heard complex to setup/maintain, solution supposedly a hack and Arbit just in an early Alpha I decided to give Hudson a shoot. Another reason for this decision, I heard it has a simple plugin architecture and is easy to install and use.

He moved away from his own bash script-based CI setup towards something a bit more technical, something that would give him a bit more control over running unit tests, create code coverage, etc. He lists three sites that helped him get his Hudson install up and running and another is mentioned in the comments.

In a new post to his blog Matthew Weier O'Phinney looks at creating reusable plugins for the Zend_Application component of the Zend Framework. This is a follow-up from his previous article introducing Zend_Application.

What happens when you need a re-usable resource for which there is no existing plugin shipped? Why, write your own, of course! All plugins in Zend Framework follow a common pattern. Basically, you group plugins under a common directory, with a common class prefix, and then notify the pluggable class of their location.

His example shows a plugin that can set the doctype of the view you're using and set the default page title and the separator. He mentions things like the framework's coding/naming standards, dependency tracking, setting up the configuration and, finally, doing the two actions laid out at the start. A few simple lines added to the application.ini file and you're all set to start using the new plugin.

Brian Swan has a new post to his MSDN blog today with a list of ten great Microsoft+PHP references (including one or two that don't belong to Microsoft!)

As I've learned (and continue to learn) PHP and Microsoft technologies, I've found some very helpful resources on the web. But, they are sometimes hard to find, and they certainly aren't usually found in one place. So, before I begin drilling into some of the things I suggested in my first post, I thought I'd take a stab at consolidating the resources that I've found to be especially helpful.

Sites included in the list are things like:

• IIS.net's guide for running PHP on IIS
• Accessing SQL Server from PHP
• StackOverflow's section on PHP
• the blog of Ruslan Yakushev a project manager for the IIS team

Rob Allen has written up a post about creating custom resources for your Zend Framework bootstrap process (for more see Matthew Weier O'Phinney's post here). In Rob's case, he wants to create one for a CouchDb interface.

In my case, I wanted to create a resource for CouchDb that checked that the database was created and if not, create it. Creating your own plugin is easy enough. The obvious place is library/App/Application/Resource

The code is quick and easy - a class that extends the Zend_Application_Resource_ResourceAbstract component and defines a basic init() method that pulls in the settings from the application.ini file for the "resources.couchdb" section. These settings can be used to create the connection or whatever needs to be done to set up the object for future use. You'll also need to add a line in the application.ini to tell the application about the custom resources directory too.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has a recent post to his blog giving a quick introduction to the Zend_Application component of the Zend Framework and how it can be used to create custom resources.

Zend_Application works in conjunction with Zend_Application_Bootstrap, which, as you might guess from its name, is what really does the bulk of the work for bootstrapping your application. It allows you to utilize plugin bootstrap resources, or define local bootstrap resources as class methods. [...] Additionally, Zend_Application_Bootstrap provides for dependency tracking (i.e., if one resource depends on another, you can ensure that that other resource will be executed first), and acts as a repository for initialized resources.

Matthew gets right into the code, looking at how to create a simple bootstrap (for the "zf" command line tool to make the project) and the contents of the application.ini file. From there he looks at creating resources - bits of code that can be executed as a part of your bootstrapping process. His example shows the implementation of "_initCurrency" and "_initRegistry" methods.

Davide Mendolia wrote in to let me know about a new site he's started to gather as much information about continuous integration in PHP into once place as he can - PHP-CI.net.

The goal of this website is to provide information for doing continuous integration in PHP and also hosting of continuous integration process for open source software. [...] On this site you will find information about continuous integration in PHP, be able to ask an hosting of your project and consult the result of the execution of builds of project hosted.

You can also check out the blog for the project to get the latest updates on hosted projects (like their first - PHPIDS) and the Google Group he's set up for discussion.

On the ITJOBLOG a recent post takes a look at how PHP has "sidled into the Enterprise" with the help of Zend and Zend Server.

Zend is flourishing despite the recession - "the Q1 of 2009 has been our strongest quarter ever," says Suraski - and although PHP's enterprise market share is small compared to Java or .NET, it is growing. [...] What interests me is why this has happened. [...] More directly important though is that the community using PHP - the large area of non-paying users in Suraski's slide - has created a remarkable pool of resources on the Internet that is available to everyone, business users included. Non-commercial users are those most likely to share their knowledge, unfettered by concerns over business confidentiality or copyright.

He notes that, upon sitting down and developing a small PHP application, every problem he encountered was easily remedied by either a Google search, a message board or in the PHP manual - "I don't mean to belittle the extent of online resources available to Java or .NET developers, but would argue that PHP has the edge here."

Benjamin Eberlei has a suggestion for testing your application without having to mess around with creating new resources just for testing - use mocks.

Much talking is going on about Unit testing, Mocks and TDD in the PHP world. For the most this discussions surround object-oriented PHP code, frameworks and applications. Yet I would assert that the reality for PHP developers (me included) is dealing with PHP 4, PHP 5 migrated, or non-object oriented legacy applications which are near to impossible to bring under test.

He includes a "proof of concept" for a replacement mysql_query function (as created inside of Runkit) that sets up a "mocker" object that returns a "hello world" message when the mysql_query function is called.

Robert Basic has put together an ever growing list of tutorials and other resources related to the Zend Framework (including several Twitter users to follow).

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.

Continuing on from his previous post in his series, Jani Hartikainen looks again at the Zend_Acl component for access control and how to deal with its "abstract" role.

In the context of Zend_Acl, access to resources is given to roles: A role might be a user's name, a group a user belongs to, or just roles, which have been assigned to a user from the admin panel. Since Zend_Acl only defines an "abstract" role, resource and privilege, how do we deal with all of these using it? Read more to find out! I'll also be addressing some more ways to deal with allowing and denying access.

He looks at how you can use your own role scheme (custom strings with meaning to you and your application) to define what the user can and can't do. He creates a plugin/interface for the framework to help handle this style so that he can compare the user's current identity against the resource type(s) they want to check.