I’m really sorry that it got so quiet here for nearly two month. The first weeks of quietness were simply caused by my laziness but since mid of September I’m totally busy finishing a new php application for my company and the deadline is coming closer and closer every minute. It’s a bit like a vicious circle: I’m of course focussed on the project and even in my spare time it’s difficult to relax because my thoughts are most of the time with the problems, bugs or tasks I need to solve next day. So I’m getting even more stressed, that leads to less productivity which leads to more stress. Well, I guess you got the point. As you can see, I located the problem, but still it’s difficult to break the cycle.
However, if I look at my statistics, there are still some people out there who didn’t kicked me out of their RSS reader lists. Thanks for that. If you are not consuming the RSS feed but visiting my site, you probably noticed that I started restarted microblogging at twitter. Seems like I’m getting more and more Web 2.0 compatible (still unsure if this is a good thing ). So basically the message of the first part of this blog post is: I’m back (even though I was never really gone).
Enough about me, let’s get to the news:

I got the announce email this morning: Zend Framework 1.6.2 is now available!
It is a bugfix release (check the changes here). I already updated my svn:externals properties and so should you.

And I got another announce email this morning: Zend Framework 1.7 Preview Release is now available!
It’s time for lunch, so let me just copy the changes in here from the email:

• New Zend_AMF component
• Dojo Toolkit 1.2.0
• New ZendX_JQuery component
• Support for dijit editor
• Metadata API in Zend_Cache
• Google book search API
• Performance enhancements
• Application-wide locale with other i18n enhancements
• File upload form element enhancements

I’m especially curious about the performance enhancements and I’m looking forward to see some new “PHP Framework Speed Comparison Benchmarks” soon.

The second 1.6 Release Candidate was published earlier this day and - wow - we’re going to get a lot of new stuff to play with. Or like Matthew put it:

There are a ton of new features available that I’m really excited about.

Word! Not only that the Zend Framework is getting more mature with every release, it’s growing unbelievably fast. I didn’t expected such a fast evolution when I started evaluating it (I guess it was version 0.92 back then).

When it comes to Javascript I’m using the Prototype/script.aculo.us combination because I already know it from RoR but I skipped through the Zend_Dojo docs and Matthew wrote a bit about the Dojo integration and I have to admit: the new Zend_Dojo stuff looks promising! I’m really thinking about dropping Prototype/script.aculo.us in favor of Dojo. I’ll write a report as soon as my evaluation process brought out some perceptions.

Next new big thing is of course Zend_Soap. It is mandatory for a modern web framework to have a SOAP component. Even though none of my active projects is using SOAP in any way (REST is all over the place nowadays), the availability of Zend_Soap let me sleep a bit better. There is a feature called Zend_Soap_Autodiscover which looks interesting. I’ll dig into that later that week, hadn’t had the time yet to do so.

Thomas finished his Zend_File_Transfer component. I already tested the component out of the trunk. I’m extensively using Zend_Form in some of my applications and this was the last piece which I really missed regularly when I worked with forms.

Besides my top 3 there are of course many other new components like Zend_Paginator (I didn’t test the component yet, but it looks helpful), Zend_Test_PHPUnit with which you can test the MVC part of your applications (I already used an earlier version from SVN, it’s very easy to work with) and Zend_Text_Figlet which is … interesting.

A big Thank You to all Zend Framework Contributors out there in the world. I seriously never enjoyed it more to develop PHP applications!

(more…)

As announced in my last blog post, I’m publishing today the second part of my Zend_Auth/Zend_Acl screencast series covering the usage of Zend_Acl. In this tutorial I’m showing how to build a static “Access Control List” and how to integrate it with the help of a plugin into an existing application.
I’ve used this way of implementing Zend_Acl some month ago on a medium-sized but simple CRUD user interface as a part of a bigger web application. So what I’m showing here is not just theory but capable for small or even medium real life projects. Maybe I will do a third screencast or write a tutorial which shows some advanced stuff like how to dynamically create and modify access control lists with the help of a database and how to cache the whole thing.

For now, enjoy the screencast.

It’s a pleasure to annouce the availability of my first Zend Framework screencast in English.
My german Zend_Auth/Zend_Acl screencast got some very positive feedback over the last month, therefore it was quite obvious to create a revised english version of it. I have splitted it into two parts:
First part covers a simple Zend_Auth example with a database table as backend.
The second part brings Zend_Acl into the game with a static Access Control List.

Enjoy the screencast. Second part will be published within the next two days.