Tag: php

Writing Gearman Workers in PHP

I've been hearing about and reading about Gearman for a couple years now, but, due to the nature of my work, it's never really been something I needed to investigate; when you're writing backend code, scalability is something you leave to the end-users, right?

Wrong! But perhaps an explanation is in order.

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PHP Invades Amsterdam; or, the Dutch PHP Conference

For the third year running, I'm pleased to be speaking at the Dutch PHP Conference, held again in Amsterdam this coming 10–12 of June.

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Please Join Me At TEK-X

I'll be speaking this year at TEK-X, this year's incarnation of the php|tek conference, in Chicago in May.

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A Primer for PHP 5.3's New Language Features

For the past month, I've been immersed in PHP 5.3 as I and my team have started work on Zend Framework 2.0. PHP 5.3 offers a slew of new language features, many of which were developed to assist framework and library developers. Most of the time, these features are straight-forward, and you can simply use them; in other cases, however, we've run into behaviors that were unexpected. This post will detail several of these, so you either don't run into the same issues — or can capitalize on some of our discoveries.

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GPG-signing Git Commits

We're working on migrating Zend Framework to Git. One issue we're trying to deal with is enforcing that commits come from CLA signees.

One possibility presented to us was the possibility of utilizing GPG signing of commit messages. Unfortunately, I was able to find little to no information on the 'net about how this might be done, so I started to experiment with some solutions.

The approach I chose utilizes git hooks, specifically the commit-msg hook client-side, and the pre-receive hook server-side.

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A Simple Resource Injector for ZF Action Controllers

Brandon Savage approached me with an interesting issue regarding ZF bootstrap resources, and accessing them in your action controllers. Basically, he'd like to see any resource initialized by the bootstrap immediately available as simply a public member of his action controller.

So, for instance, if you were using the "DB" resource in your application, your controller could access it via $this->db.

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Module Bootstraps in Zend Framework: Do's and Don'ts

I see a number of questions regularly about module bootstraps in Zend Framework, and decided it was time to write a post about them finally.

In Zend Framework 1.8.0, we added Zend_Application, which is intended to (a) formalize the bootstrapping process, and (b) make it re-usable. One aspect of it was to allow bootstrapping of individual application modules — which are discrete collections of controllers, views, and models.

The most common question I get regarding module bootstraps is:

Why are all module bootstraps run on every request, and not just the one for the requested module?

To answer that question, first I need to provide some background.

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Responding to Different Content Types in RESTful ZF Apps

In previous articles, I've explored building service endpoints and RESTful services with Zend Framework. With RPC-style services, you get to cheat: the protocol dictates the content type (XML-RPC uses XML, JSON-RPC uses JSON, SOAP uses XML, etc.). With REST, however, you have to make choices: what serialization format will you support?

Why not support multiple formats?

There's no reason you can't re-use your RESTful web service to support multiple formats. Zend Framework and PHP have plenty of tools to assist you in responding to different format requests, so don't limit yourself. With a small amount of work, you can make your controllers format agnostic, and ensure that you respond appropriately to different requests.

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Symfony Live 2010

This week, I've been attending Symfony Live in Paris, speaking on integrating Zend Framework with Symfony. The experience has been quite rewarding, and certainly eye-opening for many.

To be honest, I was a little worried about the conference — many see Symfony and ZF as being in competition, and that there would be no cross-pollination. I'm hoping that between Fabien, Stefan, and myself, we helped dispel that myth this week.

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Creating Re-Usable Zend_Application Resource Plugins

In my last article, I wrote about how to get started with Zend_Application, including some information about how to write resource methods, as well as listing available resource plugins. What happens when you need a re-usable resource for which there is no existing plugin shipped? Why, write your own, of course!

All plugins in Zend Framework follow a common pattern. Basically, you group plugins under a common directory, with a common class prefix, and then notify the pluggable class of their location.

For this post, let's consider that you may want a resource plugin to do the following:

  • Set the view doctype
  • Set the default page title and title separator

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