On the MaltBlue.com blog they've posted the latest part of their series on using Zend_Config configuration files to create Zend_Form elements. In this latest article, they show how to set some of the other properties on the elements (like "readonly" or "required").

We've looked at custom form filters and we've looked at the core form configuration. But what about the other form properties? What about: setting an element as readonly, an element as required, ignoring an element and love them or hate them, what about decorators.

He shows how to update the XML file to add these new attributes into the structure and the resulting form. Also included are a few examples of using decorators to configure the look, feel and modify the attributes.

In his previous post to the MaltBlue.com blog Matt introduced the concept of configuration-driven Zend_Form instances. He's back with a second part to the series, enhancing his original examples by covering some of the base-level form configuration settings.

Ok, this should have been part one, but irrespective, here's the second installment in zend form mastery with zend config - core form configuration. As the W3c Form spec says, there are 8 attributes applicable to forms.

These attributes, including "action", "name" and "onsubmit", can all be set easily in the XML-based configuration file. He includes an example of the full XML file to show how they all fit together (updated from part 1). You can see an example of the output here and can grab the source for the example from github.

Danne Lundqvist has a new post where he shares a bit of code he's written to "come to grips" with an existing XML structure.

Very often I find myself writing input filters for large XML files using PHP. Common enough task; and PHP offer a great variety of tools to do this effectively depending on the situation. Unfortunately, almost as common is the lack of documentation for the aforementioned XML files. [...] I have looked around for a simple tool but I didn't really find a tool that gave me the quick and dirty overview I wanted. A year or so ago I finally wrote a small PHP class to analyze large XML files.

He includes an example XML file, the HTML output of the parsing and a sample of how to use the class to parse and output the XML structure, complete with some CSS.

In this new post to the PHPMaster.com site today Vito Tardia introduces you to Phing, a tool for making builds and deploying your applications (and it's PHP based!)

Suppose you have a web application that is installed on many hosts. Each installation may have a custom configuration, and the application is still in active development. You need an easy way to deploy new features and bug fixes to all of hosts. [...] In this article I show you how to use this knowledge [from this previous article] to write a boilerplate build file, one that can be customized and reused in your real-world applications. We'll use Phing's Subversion tasks to manage the repository and the FileSync extension to synchronize your local installation with a remote server.

He helps you to get the environment set up correctly (installing the needed PEAR packages), create a basic build file with the FTP settings in it and creating a "deploy" target to do the work. He also shows the settings/configuration involved in a "prepare" target that does the SVN work to do some of the pre-push work. Finally, he shows a "release" target that bundles up the files into a package and pushes it up to the server (via FTP).

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial showing you how to test your application's interface with the database using "bulletproof" PHPUnit testing.

There's already a great article here that discusses Test Driven Development, but did you know that you can also test the code that interacts with your database? Especially if your application is data intensive, subjecting your CRUD code to a battery of tests is good practice that helps ensure that your application is working correctly. In this article you will be learning how to write database tests in PHP using PHPUnit and its database extension.

Included in the post is an example schema and an example of the seed data (defined as XML) for the testing to use as predictable data in its execution. His test class extends PHPUnit_Extensions_Database_TestCase (instead of the usual PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase) and a test for a basic "getArticles" method in his "IArticleDAO" class. By calling the "createXMLDataSet" method, the test loads in the pre-defined XML records and allows the correct evaluation of the assertions,

In this recent post to his blog, Konr Ness has benchmarked the components that the Zend Framework uses to read in different types of configuration files - JSON, native PHP arrays, INI, XML and YAML files.

If you application relies on parsing one or several config files each time it is bootstrapped it is important that you select a file format that is fast to parse. But you also want to select a config file format that is easy for a human to read and edit. In a recent application I am building I also had the need to write modifications to config files, so I also benchmarked the Zend_Config_Writer components.

He includes both the sample configuration INI file and the benchmarking script he used to measure the results (all configurations were read from external files, even the native PHP option). His results were pretty predictable (with the exception of YAML reading) with the standard INI file coming in second to the native PHP arrays, but having the advantage of being more readable.

In this new post to his blog today Marcelo Gornstein looks at doing some dependency injection in a simple application via XML and YAML configurations and the Ding dependency injection container.

In this past article I've discussed the dependency injection features when using annotations. This time, we'll see how to use the xml and yaml drivers to do the same (setter and constructor injection). If you don't know how to configure the xml and yaml drivers, please start by reading this.

He describes the different injection methods available with the container - setter injection, constructor injection and method injection. Example configuration content is included - both the XML and YAML versions.

PHPMaster.com has a new tutorial posted today about "bending XML to your will" - working with XML data using the XML Parser and SimpleXML functionality already included with PHP.

If you've ever worked with the Twitter or Facebook APIs, looked at RSS feeds from a website, or made use of some type of RPC calls, you've undoubtedly experienced working with XML. [...] Knowing how to process XML data is a crucial programming skill today, and thankfully, PHP offers multiple ways to read, filter, and even generate XML. In this article I'll explain what exactly XML is, in case you haven't had any experience with it yet, and then dive into a few ways you can use PHP to bend XML to your will.

He introduces the concepts and syntax behind XML first for those not accustomed and quickly moves into the tools to parse it. First he looks at the XML Parser, an event-based parser, and SimpleXML, an easy way to access the contents of a well-formed XML document. Snippets of code are provided for each to show you how to put them into practice.

If you're a regular reader of PHPDeveloper.org, you know that there's a few articles posted here (almost) daily about what's happening in the PHP world. Unfortunately, this only scratches the surface of the quality content that's out there. In an effort to provide more PHP goodness to the community as a whole, PHP Quick Fix has been launched - a service linking to stories that don't make it on PHPDeveloper.org.

All of the stories on PHP Quick Fix (you can also follow it on twitter) are still hand-selected out of the mounds of PHP content that shows every day to ensure the best quality. There's no automatic syndication here - just more good, useful PHP (and related topics) to add to your day.

Additionally, if you're interested to see how it all works (thanks to a GimmeBar backend) check out this post on blog.phpdeveloper.org.

If you're a last.fm user and have been curious about how to get the latest list of your "last played" selections, Philip Norton has just the code you'll need.

The other day I was approached by a friend (Julie Cheung) and asked if I could create some code that would display a list of last played tracks from last.fm. Julie isn't a PHP developer and so the code I gave her had to be easily understandable so that she could edit it herself if needed. The following code is what I came up with.

The code pulls from the defined user's "recenttracks" feed and parses it (via a simplexml_load_string call) into an object that's looped through and outputted. Data that comes back from the feed includes artist anme, name of the track, a URL to more information about it and an image of the album cover. He also includes an updated version that caches the data for three minutes so it's not always relying on the last.fm servers to be there.