You want to do WHAT with PHP? Chapter 10

With the book out and released I now reach the final chapter excerpt that I will have. As I said in one of my previous chapter excerpts, I did not write this book to cover a wide range of topics. I wrote it to cover a narrow range of topics, more fully. But the topics I chose were based off of my experiences as a Zend Consultant for several years. If you are someone with 2-5 years of experience (the typical requirement for a PHP job) you need this book. This book was born out of my experience dealing with code written by people with 2-5 years of experience, sometimes more.

This chapter is called “Preparing for success, preparing for failure”. It contains a few pseudo-rules that can go a long way to helping you manage unexpected popularity of your website. In other words, to help you in minimizing the effects of 2-5 years of programming experience. 🙂 Those rules are not complete and there are plenty of exceptions, but knowing these things will help you be more prepared for handling things like load and failure.

via You want to do WHAT with PHP? Chapter 10.

Finding syntax errors in your PHP Project files

Till posted this little snippet;
It’s so useful I just had to share it 🙂

find . \( -name "*.php" -o -name "*.phtml" \) -exec php -l {} \;

Just go to your project directory and fire it off, it will help you find those pesky unmatched {}

11 easy steps for installing Apache ActiveMQ for PHP

Take a peak at Web Developer Juice’s writeup on how to configure and use ActiveMQ (Message Queues), defenitely worth the read.

Apache ActiveMQ is one good option for implementing message queue in your PHP application. It can be easily installed on your server and it’s web accessible admin interface really makes administrator’s life easy. It can be easily connected with PHP via STOMP. I will suggesst to use MySql for Data persistance and start ActiveMQ as unix service.

Basic requirements: java, php, mysql.

via Web Developer Juice.

Bootstrapping Zend_Translate with a LangSelector Plugin

This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Working with Zend_Translate and Poedit

As an update to the method of having everything related to Zend_Translate and Zend_Locale in the Bootstrap, here is an alternative using an Controller Plugin that does the grunt work of validating, selecting and updating the Zend_Locale, Zend_Registry & Zend_Session using Zend_Session_Namespace. And we are using poedit .po & .mo files as the source as usual.

Please comment as usual if you have a neater way of doing it 🙂

Bootstrap.php

class Bootstrap extends Zend_Application_Bootstrap_Bootstrap {

protected function _initTranslate()
{
// Get current registry
$registry = Zend_Registry::getInstance();
/**
* Set application wide source Locale
* This is usually your source string language;
* i.e. $this->translate('Hi I am an English String');
*/
$locale = new Zend_Locale('en_US');

/**
* Set up and load the translations (all of them!)
* resources.translate.options.disableNotices = true
* resources.translate.options.logUntranslated = true
*/
$translate = new Zend_Translate('gettext',
APPLICATION_PATH . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR .'languages', 'auto',
array(
'disableNotices' => true, // This is a very good idea!
'logUntranslated' => false, // Change this if you debug
)
);
/**
* Both of these registry keys are magical and makes
* ZF 1.7+ do automagical things.
*/
$registry->set('Zend_Locale', $locale);
$registry->set('Zend_Translate', $translate);
return $registry;
}
}

This little plugin will check every request for a lang paramenter and act on it.
It does not matter if you set the lang parameter using a custom route :lang/:controller/:action
or via a get/post ?lang= etc. one or all of them will work.

library/App/Controller/Plugin/LangSelector.php


* @name App_Controller_Plugin_LangSelector
* @filesource library/App/Controller/Plugin/LangSelector.php
* @tutorial Instantiate in application.ini with;
* resources.frontController.plugins.LangSelector =
* "App_Controller_Plugin_LangSelector"
* @desc Takes the lang parameneter when set either via a
* route or get/post and switches Locale, This depends
* on the main initTranslate function in Bootstrap.php
* to set the initial Zend_Translate object.
* Inspiration from ZendCasts LangSelector.
*/
class App_Controller_Plugin_LangSelector extends Zend_Controller_Plugin_Abstract
{
public function preDispatch(Zend_Controller_Request_Abstract $request)
{
$registry = Zend_Registry::getInstance();
// Get our translate object from registry.
$translate = $registry->get('Zend_Translate');
$currLocale = $translate->getLocale();
// Create Session block and save the locale
$session = new Zend_Session_Namespace('session');

$lang = $request->getParam('lang','');
// Register all your "approved" locales below.
switch($lang) {
case "sv":
$langLocale = 'sv_SE'; break;
case "fr":
$langLocale = 'fr_FR'; break;
case "en":
$langLocale = 'en_US'; break;
default:
/**
* Get a previously set locale from session or set
* the current application wide locale (set in
* Bootstrap)if not.
*/
$langLocale = isset($session->lang) ? $session->lang : $currLocale;
}

$newLocale = new Zend_Locale();
$newLocale->setLocale($langLocale);
$registry->set('Zend_Locale', $newLocale);

$translate->setLocale($langLocale);
$session->lang = $langLocale;

// Save the modified translate back to registry
$registry->set('Zend_Translate', $translate);
}
}

Big thanks to Zend Cast for the inspiration!

Deep Integration between Zend Framework and Doctrine 1.2

There’s been a lot of talk online about finding the best approach for bringing Zend Framework and Doctrine 1.x together. This video is my humble approach of combining some of the learning brought about over the last few weeks on Zendcasts, as well as suggestions from Doctrine developers.

The goal of this video is to show how you leverage the existing resource loading tools in Zend to have a model structure that reflects Zend’s best practices. This video builds on the last Doctrine video, but if you’re familiar with both frameworks, you should be able to follow along. Enjoy!

via Deep Integration between Zend and Doctrine 1.2 | free Zend Framework screencasts – Zendcasts.

Continuous Integration for PHP – phpUnderControl & CruiseControl

Did you know that you can automate unit tests (which is the PHP worlds equalient of compilation checks 🙂 ).

Set up your development team using local checkouts of the project and have them do local PHPUnit tests, check their changes in and then get Continuous Integration checks done on a central server using phpUnderControl that emails the team with success/fail reports, it’s a good way to work.

phpUnderControl is an addon application for the continuous integration tool CruiseControl, which integrates some of the best PHP development tools. This project aims to make your first steps with CruiseControl and PHP as easy as possible. Therefore phpUnderControl comes with a command line tool that performs all modifications to an existing CruiseControl installation.

Integrated tools

  • Testing and software metrics – PHPUnit is the most popular xUnit implementation for PHP that provides a framework for automated software tests. Except the pure test automation PHPUnit contains a rich set of features like Code Coverage, Project Mess Detection and Software Metrics. To visualize the generated XML reports phpUnderControl comes with a set of XSL stylesheets that prepare the output for CruiseControl.
  • Documentation – phpUnderControl uses the most common documentation tool for PHP projects, PhpDocumentor, to generate an up to date documentation of the software on every build cycle. Therefore the developers will always get the latest API documentation of their project. Additionally phpUnderControl extracts the documentation violations found by the PhpDocumentor and visualizes these as an additional quality report in the user interface and the project time line of documentation violations.
  • Coding Standards – With the package PHP_CodeSniffer the PEAR project gave PHP developers a very useful tool to detect coding standard violations in a project. Since version 1.0.0RC3 it has native support for the Checkstyle XML format that can be visualized by CruiseControl. PHP_CodeSniffer comes with a variety of pre defined coding standards like PEAR and ZEND but due to its modular structure you can easily implement a custom rule set or extend one of the pre defined sets. This development tool assures that the whole project code will remain clean and consistent.

Go and check it out today 🙂

Generate Doctrine models/classes that extend a custom record class

When using using Doctrine 1.2.1 and Zend Framework 1.9.x to generate classes from Yaml/db each Base class (which includes the table definition) extends the Doctrine_Record class.

I need to find a way of telling Doctrine to extend my own Base class, or find a different solution to a master/slave db setup using Doctrine.

Example generated model:

abstract class My_Base_User extends Doctrine_Record
{

However I need it to be automatically generated as:

abstract class My_Base_User extends My_Record
{

And the answer is (drumroll)

Typical, as soon as I ask the question I manage to find the answer. I’m recording it here in case anyone else has the same issue.

You can pass in the parameter ‘baseClassName’ into the generateModels* methods and Doctrine will use that as the Base record class.

Examples:

Doctrine_Core::generateModelsFromDb('models', array('master'), array('generateTableClasses' => true, 'baseClassName' => 'My_Record'));

or using Cli:

$options['generate_models_options'] = array(
'pearStyle'             => true,
'baseClassPrefix'       => 'My_',
'baseClassName'         => 'My_Record',
'classPrefix'           => '',
'classPrefixFiles'      => false,
'generateTableClasses'  => true,
);
$cli = new Doctrine_Cli($options);

Cloud computing with PHP – Using Amazon EC2 with the Zend Framework

Doug Tidwell is a senior software engineer in IBM’s Emerging Technology group. He just wrote a two part article on Moving data into and out of the cloud with the Zend Framework and Using virtual machines with the Zend Framework.

Summary: The Zend Framework contains several classes that make using cloud-based storage services easy.

Part 1 and Part 2.

Cloud computing with PHP, Part 2: Using Amazon EC2 with the Zend Framework