Jordi Boggiano has a new post to his site about a recent update to the Composer tool that can help make managing development-only dependencies a bit easier.

Using require-dev in Composer you can declare the dependencies you need for development/testing. It works in most simple cases, but when the dev dependencies overlap with the regular ones, it can get tricky to handle. In too many cases it also tends to just fail at resolving dependencies with quite strange error messages. Since this was quite unreliable, I set out to rework the whole feature this week-end. The patch has been merged, and it fixes six open issues which is great.

Additionally, to make it easier to work with the development dependencies, they'll by default be installed when you run an "update" in your repository. If you don't want them, you can still use "--no-dev". Also, Composer will manage them in a seperate section from the normal "require" packages. If you're not using Composer to manage your application's dependencies, look over on getcomposer.org for more details.

On NetTuts.com there's a new screencast posted showing you a good way to create a better workflow in your PHP development using Composer and PHPUnit.

In this video tutorial, we'll again focus on workflow. Specifically, we'll use Composer's built-in autoloading capabilities, along with namespacing, to make for an elegant testing experience. We'll also review a handful of PHPUnit best practices, as we get setup with these tools.

He shows you how to use Composer to load in the packages from other projects (as well as your own) and using PHPUnit to execute unit tests for your application. He uses test-driven development, but it's not a required part of the workflow. He helps you create a simple "Calculator" test. He also shows how to manually modify the Composer classmap to load in your own classes.

Adam Peterson has posted an interesting idea for those out there running an internal staging server they want to constantly keep up to date with the main line of code (without manual intervention) - a git pull web frontend combined with git post-receive hooks.

This [move from svn to git] left a bit of a gap in my process where I could no longer test on a remote server without updating it manually by S/FTP or opening terminal and manually calling a git pull. Open terminal and manually git pull it did break up the work flow a bit so using the Dingo framework I created a very simple Git helper and gave it its own URL something like git/pull.

He added a post-receive hook to his git server that calls this "git/pull" URL on the staging server and updates the code on the server. This provides an easy asynchronous way to update things on another server. Note, though, that this should never be done on a publicly accessible server - it's a pretty large security hole (or at the very least made secure somehow). He used Dingo to create his interface, but something like the Slim micro-framework could have worked just as well. You can view his code on github.

On the Smashing Magazine site today Brian Hoyt has some suggestions for you to use to keep your workflow organized when developing your applications (code, file structure, assets, database, etc).

Perhaps in the past you've tried to build a more complex, cutting-edge website like [our example], and the project started off with great enthusiasm, but ended up in a nightmarish mess that you couldn't maintain. Your client lost interest when new features started getting too hard to add, and you started having to work late at night, tracking down bugs that you couldn't even find the relevant file for. After a project like that, it's not hard to see the relevance of a well-organized website project.

He talks about some general principles like "don't over-organize" and "don't mix aspects of the site" as well as some more specific things like a website size to structure recommendation and parts of a site and how to handle them - assets, stylesheets, javascript, the database structure/values and, of course, the code.

In this new post to the Zend Developer Zone, they point out a workflow diagram Polley Wong has come up with showing how the Zend Framework's dispatch system works (request handling).

I've been researching Zend Framework lately and was curious about what's actually happening behind the scene of the whole dispatch process. Inspired by Thorsten Ruf's (zenddispatch_en.pdf) clear and beautifully presented workflow, I decided to go a step deeper and crawl Zend Framework's code. I came up with my own version of the flexible yet complicated workflow.

You can check out this new PDF here. It diagrams out an overall view of the request handling, a look at what happens inside the front controller including components like the Controller Dispatcher, Action Controller, Action Helper Broker and Response Object.

Sebastian Bergmann has a post about a new feature of the Workflow component in the eZ Components libraries - the Cancel Case Pattern.

Version 1.2 of the Workflow component that is part of the eZ Components adds support for the Cancel Case workflow pattern:

Once this Workflow pattern is called the complete Workflow instance is removed from the current execution (including any running nodes). You can find out more about the ezWorkflowNode in their documentation.

On the KillerPHP.com website today, there's a good beginner's guide (from J. Lenensold) about using version control in your development - specifically Subversion.

As projects start to get a little larger, it becomes crucial that you manage your code in an easy and organized manner. Using subversion is a breeze with tools like TortoiseSVN on windows and SCPlugin on the mac.

This article is an attempt at introducing the concept of SVN. There are many great tutorials out there that outline the steps for installing SVN on windows, mac and linux.

He talks about why using version control is a good thing, how it can speed up testing and even relates it back to PHPers with a sample workflow (with graphic) and some helpful hints as you introduce this very handy functionality into your development process.

Derick Rethans points out a milestone in the life of the eZ Components project - the release of their fourth major version:

Earlier today we, the eZ Components development team, put out our fourth major release. This new release comes with two new components (Authentication and Workflow) as well as more than 200 other updates.

He details what the two new components are all about and includes comments about the stability of the eZ Components libraries (due to the use of test-driven development) and mentions one component in particular - Mail.

As mentioned in his latest blog entry today, >Tobias Schlitt and company have put out the latest version of the eZ Components library - version 2007.1 beta 1.

This release (which will go stable in a few weeks) includes lots of new features and many bug fixes.

Feature updates included in this release include updates to the Graph component to add radar charts and PDO data sets, support for MS SQL server in the Database component and named parameter and dynamic location support for the Template component.

There were also two new components added - Authentication and Workflow. You can either grab the package from the website as a download or you can use the pear upgrade functionality to grab the latest version and automatically install it.

Richard Lord has posted some thoughts about why he likes one of his latest explorations - the Zend Framework - on his blog today.

I've been researching the Zend Framework for PHP in relation to a project I'm working on and I have to say I'm now a fan of it. There's lots to like about it, and some to dislike about it too. But to me the best aspect of it is the flexibility it offers.

He also mentions other reasons for liking it, including the simplicity of working his current application/workflow into the Framework's methods. There is one hit he mentions that the Framework team could improve on - the documentation.