In a new post on the Rdavid.net blog there's some discussion about Zend Framework models, the best approach and a "Service Class" idea.

After some more thought and lots of research on the subject, I've come to a solid point where I actually have something to try out which seems semantic aside from the naming of the class (Service Class) '" but this is derived from what some people are talking about in ZF circles starting from Matthew Weier O'Phinney who was coining it as the "Gateway to the Domain" from early on, then later changing it to "Service Class".

He defines what his service class idea is - a layer between the database and each of the models that allows them to be agnostic about what kind of service they're using. He also breaks down some of the key points around his approach including the fact that the Model Service can create Forms and that the Model Service can use the Zend_Cache component directly for improving performance. Be sure to check out the comments for thought from other Zend Framework developers.

Mentioned on the Ibuildings blog today is a new white paper (contact details required for download) from Ivo Jansch, the CTO of Ibuildings about creating service APIs for your web-based applications.

Every company starts with a single website or web application, but as a company's online presence grows, many different applications and sites are deployed. With a traditional approach of treating each of these applications as separate solutions, a number of problems occur [...] Service APIs can help you reuse a set of common functionality, which is implemented only once into the service layer. They can also help integrate third party applications in a consistent and robust way, and work around possible performance limitations.

The whitepaper covers the differences between the traditional development model and how the service model changes how you think about your backend. He covers implementation, development, documentation, testing methods and general maintenance down the line.

In a new post to his blog Juozas Kaziukenas takes a look at one of the pieces of "glue" that makes up the typical web application - the service layer.

During this year I invested quite a lot for a search of a good ways to architecture a big application and make it simply good. Quite a while ago Matthew Weier O'Phinney introduced service layer in one of his great talks about models, since then service layer become one of the key architectural component one my applications. Here I'm going to show a few examples and use cases where it's very useful.

He looks at the "old style" of data interaction that several applications use as compared to injected objects and information more structured applications have put to use. He also outlines a practical use of the service layer structure - thinking of it as a layer allowing to you connect to a service, either local or remote, without the rest of the application needing to know about it.

Following up on a previous post about dependency injection, Giorgio Sironi has posted this new look at when to use dependency injection and when its still better to handle objects individually.

In the last post, I introduced Dependency Injection and show useful cases where it allows classes decouplng. I also wrote about the problem of how to inject a service in a class that has to be instantiated not application wide but in the business logic.

He creates an example that shows a not-so-good place to use dependency injection and offers a solution - a factory that creates the objects as they're needed instead of having them floating around when they're not needed. He also talks about the difference between two types of business objects to consider in dependency injection: entities and services (hint: one depends on the other).

In this new post to his blog about an interface (SDK) he's releasing to connect PHP applications with Microsoft's Windows Azure resource.

As part of Microsoft's commitment to Interoperability, a new open source project has just been released on CodePlex: PHP SDK for Windows Azure, bridging PHP developers to Windows Azure. PHPAzure is an open source project to provide software development kit for Windows Azure and Windows Azure Storage '" Blobs, Tables & Queues. I'm pleased that Microsoft has chosen RealDolmen and me to work on the PHP SDK for Windows Azure.

The SDK lets PHP developers connect with the Cloud Services Platform and allows them instant access to the different portions of functionality including tables, logging tools, request type helpers (REST, Error, etc) connecting to the Compute/Store/Manage features of Azure.

Hasin Hayder has a quick post about taking a URL in the opposite direction than most seem to go these days - from shortened to the long, full URL.

Now when you get the short url shortened by using any of these services, you dont know where your browser is taking you! so if you are interested to figure out the original url hiding behind these short url, you need to have a little knowledge on how these services actually work.

Then the short URL is hit, the HTTP response is in the 300 family and the browser is redirected to the correct location. He uses cURL in PHP to grab this header information and parse out the full-length URL to return both the URL requested (the shortened one) and the full-length it was generated to point to.

On the Zend Developer Zone a new article has been posted (by Vikram Vaswani) about how you can use the Services_Twitter PEAR package to connect your applications with Twitter.

Unless you've been living in a cave for the last few years, you know what Twitter is - a free online service that allows users to send out concise, real-time updates on what they're doing at any given moment.

[...] The really good stuff, though, is hidden behind the scenes. Like many Web 2.0 applications, Twitter exposes its innards to the public via a REST API, making it possible to develop customized applications that run on top of the base service. [...] This article focuses on one such library, the PEAR Services_Twitter library, which provides a full-featured API for interacting with the Twitter service through a PHP application.

Once the package is fetched (via the "pear" command on the command line) he shows how to make some example connections like grabbing the most recent status for a user, updating that status, grabbing recent posts from a user's timeline, finding followers/friends and much more. The package makes it so simple that any one of these examples isn't much more that seven or eight lines long.

Fabien Potencier has posted the most recent article in his "Symfony Service Container" series, a look at using XML/YAML to describe services.

Today, with the help of service loaders and dumpers, you will learn how to use XML or YAML to describe your services. The Symfony Dependency Injection component provides helper classes that load services using "loader objects". By default, the component comes with two of them: sfServiceContainerLoaderFileXml to load XML files, and sfServiceContainerLoaderFileYaml to load YAML files.

He reviews the "dumper objects" - tools used to take a service container and push it out into normal PHP code - and how you can use them to dump the Service Container's information out to the XML and YAML formats. Once you have this, it can be loaded back at any time via the two loaders mentioned above. There's plenty of code examples included for these and other more detailed examples.

Fabien Potencier has posted another article about dependency injection and the Symfony service container. In this part of the series he looks at the "need for speed" - reducing the need for the XML/YAML parsing of the same information on every request via a new tool, the PHP dumper.

With the introduction of the XML and YAML configuration files, you might have became a bit sceptic about the performance of the container itself. Even if services are lazy loading, reading a bunch of XML or YAML files on each request and creating objects by using introspection is probably not very efficient in PHP. [...] How can you have the best of both world? That's quite simply. The Symfony Dependency Injection component provides yet another built-in dumper: a PHP dumper.

The dumper lets you convert the service container into regular PHP code (expanding the container's functionality out into a Container class based on the XML/YAML configuration.

Leendert Brouwer has come up with a (complete) look at PHP backends as written for Zend Framework applications.

Some of these frameworks became rather popular, but the big hit in PHP's framework department came when Zend released its own framework - the Zend Framework. Being "the PHP company" and all, their framework got a lot of attention. And it wasn't all marketing buzz. It really is a fairly well architected, functional piece of software that can make the lives of developers easier. But what did the Zend Framework offer us, in reality?

He looks at some of what the framework has to offer - public interfaces, simplified database refactoring, parallel development - and domain objects. The bulk of the post deals with the Service Layer - how to more correctly split out controller functionality from model functionality and separate our the layers accordingly. He throws in a few opinions near the end about things like upfront design, application scale and the possible overhead of his approach.