Tag: PHP

Deployment with Zend Server (Part 2 of 8)

This is the second in a series of eight posts detailing tips on deploying to Zend Server. The previous post in the series detailed getting started with Zend Server on the AWS marketplace and using zf-deploy to create ZPK packages to deploy to Zend Server.

Today, I'm looking at how to created scheduled/recurring jobs using Zend Server's Job Queue; think of this as application-level cronjobs.

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Deployment with Zend Server (Part 1 of 8)

I manage a number of websites running on Zend Server, Zend's PHP application platform. I've started accumulating a number of patterns and tricks that make the deployments more successful, and which also allow me to do more advanced things such as setting up recurring jobs for the application, clearing page caches, and more.

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Testing Code That Emits Output

Here's the scenario: you have code that will emit headers and content, for instance, a front controller. How do you test this?

The answer is remarkably simple, but non-obvious: namespaces.

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Better Understanding Controllers Through Basic Patterns

Paul M. Jones has started an interesting discussion rethinking the MVC pattern as applied to the web, which he has dubbed Action-Domain-Responder (ADR). If you haven't given it a read yet, click the link and do that; this page will still be sitting here waiting when you return.

I agree with a ton of it — heck, I've contributed to it a fair bit via conversations with Paul. But there's been one thing nagging at me for a bit now, and I was finally able to put it into words recently.

Controllers — Actions in ADR — can be explained as facades.

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Apigility: Using RPC with HAL

A few days ago, we released our first beta of Apigility. We've started our documentation effort now, and one question has arisen a few times that I want to address: How can you use Hypermedia Application Language (HAL) in RPC services?

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RESTful APIs with ZF2, Part 3

In my previous posts, I covered basics of JSON hypermedia APIs using Hypermedia Application Language (HAL), and methods for reporting errors, including API-Problem and vnd.error.

In this post, I'll be covering documenting your API — techniques you can use to indicate what HTTP operations are allowed, as well as convey the full documentation on what endpoints are available, what they accept, and what you can expect them to return.

While I will continue covering general aspects of RESTful APIs in this post, I will also finally introduce several ZF2-specific techniques.

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RESTful APIs with ZF2, Part 2

In my last post, I covered some background on REST and the Richardson Maturity Model, and some emerging standards around hypermedia APIs in JSON; in particular, I outlined aspects of Hypermedia Application Language (HAL), and how it can be used to define a generic structure for JSON resources.

In this post, I cover an aspect of RESTful APIs that's often overlooked: reporting problems.

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RESTful APIs with ZF2, Part 1

RESTful APIs have been an interest of mine for a couple of years, but due to circumstances, I've not had much chance to work with them in any meaningful fashion until recently.

Rob Allen and I proposed a workshop for PHP Benelux 2013 covering RESTful APIs with ZF2. When it was accepted, it gave me the perfect opportunity to dive in and start putting the various pieces together.

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OpenShift, Cron, and Naked Domains

As an experiment, I migrated my website over to OpenShift yesterday. I've been hosting a pastebin there already, and have found the service to be both straightforward and flexible; it was time to put it to a more thorough test.

In the process, I ran into a number of interesting issues, some of which took quite some time to resolve; this post is both to help inform other potential users of the service, as well as act as a reminder to myself.

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On php-fig and Shared Interfaces

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a long time, and one requested of me personally by Evert Pot during the Dutch PHP Conference in June 2012. It details some observations I have of php-fig, and hopefully will serve as a record of why I'm not directly participating any longer.

I was a founding member of the Framework Interoperability Group, now called "php-fig". I was one of around a dozen folks who sat around a table in 2009 in Chicago during php|tek and started discussions about what we could all do to make it possible to work better together between our projects, and make it simpler for users to pick and choose from our projects in order to build the solutions to their own problems.

The first "standard" that came from this was PSR-0, which promoted a standard class naming convention that uses a 1:1 relationship between the namespace and/or vendor prefix and the directory hierarchy, and the class name and the filename in which it lives. To this day, there are both those who hail this as a great step forward for cooperation, and simultaneously others who feel it's a terrible practice.

And then nothing, for years. But a little over a year ago, there was a new push by a number of folks wanting to do more. Paul Jones did a remarkable job of spearheading the next two standards, which centered around coding style. Again, just like with PSR-0, we had both those feeling it was a huge step forward, and those who loathe the direction.

What was interesting, though, was that once we started seeing some new energy and momentum, it seemed that everyone wanted a say. And we started getting dozens of folks a week asking to be voting members, and new proposal after new proposal. Whether or not somebody likes an existing standard, they want to have backing for a standard they propose.

And this is when we started seeing proposals surface for shared interfaces, first around caching, and now around logging (though the latter is the first up for vote).

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