In the latest to his site Matthew Setter takes a look at easy routing with RouteMatch in Zend Framework 2 applications. The RouteMatch component gives you better control over your routing and lets you define "match paths" for URL to Controller mappings.

Today using Zend Framework 2 RouteMatch, Router and Request objects, I show you an easy way to dynamically update the current route. It's almost painlessly simple. [...] Well, like most things in web application development, what starts out simply in the beginner often grows more complex over time. So too is my once simple route.

His "simple" route started getting a bit out of control when he added in some pagination to the page (and query for the path match). He wanted to figure out how to re-render data with the same filters but show the next page of data. He shows how to use the RouteMatch component to achieve just this. He creates a custom module with a "listViewToolbar" helper that lets you read the router, request and handle the parameters sent via the URL. The "invoke" method is called to render the toolbar in the page, complete with the new settings.

On the phpDevelopment blog today Anderi Gabreanu has posted the second part in this Zend Framework tutorial series with a look at how to successfully debug your application with the help of the ZFDebug Toolbar.

Continuing with the tutorial series, we will see how to debug the application. Debugging include easy to use methods of printing data on the screen, including ZFDebug Toolbar in order to manage all errors and queries, using the logger to log messages to Firebug, using a simple debug function that will place debug messages in your ZFDebug Toolbar, in a special Debug panel, using a redirect debug function in order to see what is happening during your requests, using redirect in a Controller plugin.

He shows how to set up your index file (front controller) to make the ZFDebug toolbar work with your application and how to relay messages back out for your to view.

Dennis sent in a submission about a toolbar he's created to work with the Zend Debugger (in an extension) for the Chrome Browser:

Since i have not yet seen an official extension for chrome (or i have not looked hard enough), i created one so i don't have to switch back to Firefox all the time, while I wait for the official extension. It only has the basic functionality (debug, debug next, profile and some configuration options) and it probably has some bugs and quirks, but it functions fine for me.

You can download this toolbar from here and if you have issues installing it, you might check out this post on the Zend Forums.

In a new post to his blog today Johannes Schluter talks about a plugin for the NetBeans IDE that allows you to run tests for PHP's regression test suite right in the editor.

The test system therefore produces a bunch of files, a file containing the expected output, one containing the actual output and a diff between these as relevant files. The problem there is that the diff, for being portable, is using a quite simple mechanism which only shows the lines which differ without any context.

[...] Lately I've changed my way of working and use vim less, I still use it, but I use NetBeans as an IDE more and more. So I thought a bit about that test issue and searched my brain for my Java skills and started playing around to see whether I manage to write a NetBeans plugin which can run the tests and report the results in a usable way.

Hes created a project for the plugin (where you can download the latest version - 0.6.0) and install it to your local IDE copy. It adds a toolbar icon, asks for the location of the binaries to test and runs the diff quickly and easily. You can see a screenshot of the tool in action here.

The Symfony blog points out a handy feature included with the latest release of the framework - a web debugging toolbar that gives you a quick summary of the stats for the current page.

The symfony web debug toolbar is one of the developer best friend. It is always conveniently accessible in the browser when using the development environment. It gives you everything you need to know about the current page and ease the debugging of your applications. Until now, all the information available in this toolbar were hardcoded. But as of symfony 1.2, the web debug toolbar is entirely configurable.

The toolbar contains information like: the version of the framework you're using, cache information, logging, memory usage and the execution time of the page. They also include a bit on how to customize your toolbar, adding and removing panels from the bar as well as changing up the look with styles.

The Zend Developer Zone has a bonus episode of their PHP Abstract podcast series posted, a different sort of episode - it's a video podcast as hosted by Davey Shafik and covering the combination of Ajax and PHP (and debugging all along the way).

Davey is a full time PHP Developer with 10 years experience in PHP and related technologies. An avid author for both magazines and books author, Davey keeps his mind sharp by trying to tackle problems from a unique perspective. Today Davey is going to show us how to debug Ajax applications using Firebug and the Zend Developer toolbar.

You can grab the video [mov] directly from the ZDZ site or subscribe to their feed to get this and other great podcasts.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted their latest edition of their podcast - PHP Abstract. In this episode Yossi Leno looks at using the Zend Toolbars to work in your applications.

Our special guest for this episode of the PHP Abstract podcast is Yossi is the product manager for the development tools group at Zend. He is going to talk to us today about using the Zend Browser Toolbars for Debugging and Profiling your applications.

There's two ways to get the new show - download it directly or subscribe to their feed and get the latest ones hand delivered. They've also started a new program to help bring in more community input into the podcast (oh, and they pay too - $75) for making your contribution.

Jim Plush got impatient for Zend to update their Zend Studio Plugin for Mozilla and Firefox, so he did it himself.

Again, I can't wait any longer for people to update firefox2 extensions. Here is a download link for the Zend Toolbar Extension for Firefox 2: http://www.litfuel.net/plush/files/ZendFirefoxToolbar-1.5.1.xpi.

The Zend Studio Plugin for Mozilla/Firefox allows developers to debug and profile PHP applications (running on the Zend Platform) through the web. Check out Zend's page for more information.

What do you get when you combine a method for remote debugging Zend Server from the CLI and some creative javascript handling? This updated tool from Davey Shafik, a toolbar item for Firefox to link directly to the debugger on the Zend Server.

Simply drag this link to your Personal Toolbar: Debug in ZDE

Then, edit its link (Right click > Properties) and change the debug_host to your own IP (this link has it set for localhost). Your IP must be in the zend_debugger.allow_hosts php.ini setting for this to work.

The end result is that you can directly debug the page you're viewing without having to fool with going the long way around with the debugger.