Joshua Thijssen has shared a handy tip for those using Zend Server on a pupptet-ed server - using a Facter plugin to check for the ZS install and only install what's needed (rather than end up with multiple PHP installs).

This means you should not install the default PHP package for your distribution when the distribution also runs on Zend Server. This Facter plugin will allow you to use the $zendserver fact inside your own manifests to check if Zend server is installed, so you can take measures against installing stuff that is taken care of by ZendServer itself.

You can download the plugin from his github account, https://github.com/jaytaph/puppet-facter-zendserver, and easily install it into your puppet setup.

In a new post today Kevin Schroeder points out a new feature in the Zend Server project (version 5.5, beta) that helps make deployment simple for your site. He also includes a "getting started" guide to show it in action.

We have announced that we are making the beta for our new deployment feature in Zend Server 5.5 beta, available for download. It's not feature complete (there are some new features being worked on), but it provides the functionality needed for the 90% of us who do not have the need to have crazy complex deployment scenarios.

A short video is also included in the post to show how it's all set up in the Zend Server interface. His guide, using the "zdpack" tool, shows how to package up a basic Zend Framework project, create the deployment skeleton (including handy hooks like "stage/unstage", "activate/deactivate" where you can put Zend Framework-based PHP code), modify the deployment file to your needs and "zdpack" the result into a single packaged zip file. There's a forum for support and some sample applications if you'd like to try it out with less hassle.

On the IBM developerWorks site today there's a new tutorial from Daniel Krook showing you how to use the IBM Cloud product to set up a development environment based on a Red Hat Enterprise server distribution with Zend Server as the PHP environment.

This article explains what makes cloud computing appealing to PHP developers and provides step-by-step instructions how to use the IBM Cloud to set up a PHP and DB2 development environment quickly. Learn how to provision Linux data and web application servers, connect to the virtual machines via SSH, use X Forwarding to install a pre-configured PHP distribution, and test your connection to DB2.

He starts with some benefits that the IBM Cloud can bring to developers and lists a few common goals that they look for in their development platforms. The rest of the post walks you through the setup and install of a sample instance - adding and configuring it, connecting via an SSH connection and installing Zend Server to give you a simple, hassle-free installation of a PHP environment.

In his newly updated blog today (changed to WordPress) Kevin Schroeder has a new post looking at a new queuing library available for Zend Server's Job Queue including an example of its use.

This will probably be one of the last posts I do on the Zend Server Job Queue functionality. From this point on they will probably be less frequent, though I'm sure several posts will allude to it. The reason I'm going to put it on the back burner is because I have written a library which is now available on GitHub. What it does is encapsulate all of the functionality that I think needs to be there to be able to implement asynchronous functionality.

In his example code, he shows how to use the library to create a job class that sends a basic email to a defined address and how to set it up with the Manager. Then the action can be called from a script getting the remote job and checking to see when the job has finished.

Tibo Beijen has a new post today showing his method for fixing mysqldump on Zend Server CE running on an OS X platform. The default install throws a socket error when you try to dump a database using the command.

Inspecting the mysql configuration contained in /usr/local/zend/mysql/data/my.cnf confirmed that the section [client] showed the socket as returned by executing SHOW VARIABLES; from the mysql client: /usr/local/zend/mysql/tmp/mysql.sock Although it is possible to specify the socket by using mysqldump's --socket switch, that doesn't really seem a 'solution'.

As a real solution to the problem was to copy over the my.cnf file from the custom location Zend Server has it in to the default "/etc/my.cnf" with settings pointing to the correct MySQL socket.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has a new post to his blog today about making your Zend Server instance a bit more secure by taking the admin GUI and forcing it to be HTTPS-only (instead of the default HTTP & HTTPS).

In light of the recent remote PHP exploit, I decided to update a couple servers I manage to ensure they weren't vulnerable. In each case, I had been using hand-compiled PHP builds, but decided that I'm simply too busy lately to be trying to maintain updates -- so I decided to install Zend Server. [...] One thing I've never been happy about, however, is that by default Zend Server exposes its administration GUI via both HTTP and HTTPS. Considering that the password gives you access to a lot of sensitive configuration, I want it to be encrypted.

He points out that, since the Zend Server interface runs on a lighttpd instance, it's easy to modify a few config files to change the setting. Adding a few lines to limit the socket it can connect on, the IP address to filter to and a URL filter on anything starting with "/ZendServer/" takes away the HTTP access.

On PHPEverywhere John Lim has posted some of his experiences in his migration up from PHP 5.2 to version 5.3 for his site, including code issues and how he upgraded.

Now that PHP 5.2 is at the end of life, we are starting to migrate to PHP 5.3.

Things he mentions are:

• The deprecation of session_register
• The change of creating a new object by reference
• Other deprecated functions listed here
• His commands to upgrade his Zend Server instance from 5.2 to 5.3

Christoph Dorn has a new post today showing how to get the FirePHP tool to work together with Zend Server on an AWS instance to help make your debugging even simpler.

FirePHP can nicely complement the built-in tools available when using Zend Server and can be easily made available to all provisioned sites. This tutorial illustrates how to setup FirePHP 1.0 for all virtual hosts on a Zend Server AMI on Amazon EC2.

He steps you through the process of getting FirePHP installed and working in your browser as well as pulling the "firephp.phar" file in on the Zend Server side. Configuration is pretty simple - the lines for the Apache config are included and the JSON needed to make the credentials for FirePHP are too. A simple test script is created and an auth key is set and you should be up and running.

New on the Zend Developer Zone today is an article from Shahar Evron about mirroring Zend Server repositories to re-serve them out, either to a different community or as a part of your internal processes.

There are several good reasons to mirror a Linux repository, be it the Zend repositories or any other repository. The most simple reason is sheer performance: if you need to install Zend Server on a number of machines, you can save a lot of valuable time by creating a local mirror of the repositories, and using that mirror as your installation source for all servers.

He also points out that it can save on bandwidth used - pulling from local will always be more efficient. It also gives you more control about exactly what software is installed on your servers. He breaks the mirroring process up into four steps (with a few added helpful hints at the end):

• Copy the Zend Server repository to a local machine
• Local Repository Test
• Enable network access to your local repository
• Configure clients to use your local repository

In a new post to his blog Kevin Schroeder shows how to use the Zend_Server component of the Zend Framework to make a script that automatically makes the server you need based off of the request type.

I've been doing some work with Adobe on some articles and one of them was on working with mobile clients with Flash. Well, me being the masochist I did more. What I did was write an example that worked as a full website, an Ajax website, a Flash service and an XML-RPC service. [...] In a plugin, which I will show you in a bit, I attached an instance of Zend_Server_Interface. Then in the controller I simple told it to do its thing, with the exception of handing the Service Mapping Description for JSON-RPC ($smd). That's it.

Because of how the XML-RPC, JSON and AMF servers are handled, they extend the main Zend_Server_Interface, making it easy to create them on the fly. He includes the code for both the sample controller and the plugin mentioned above. It checks for Ajax, AMF, XML and JSON request types and sets the service handler correctly. If there's not one, it falls back on the mapping.