Zend_Form decorator tips

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

It seems a lot of people are struggling with Zend_Form decorators. They want to know how to modify the markup, but they can't figure out how to do it with the bundled decorators or how to write their own. Since I've done some decorator-stuff myself, I thought I'd share some tips ...

View inheritance and “blocks” in Zend_View

Friday, August 1st, 2008

Some frameworks like Django and PRADO have the concept of view inheritance, or a "master page" like in ASP.NET. Essentially it's a similar idea as Zend_Layout is in Zend Framework, but the difference is that you can define the master/parent view inside the view itself. For example, in Django {% extends ...

Making working with DB records easier with a controller helper

Saturday, July 5th, 2008

The other day I noticed a pattern that repeats quite much in my code: Take a parameter from the request, such as id Query the DB for a record that matches the param Redirect or throw a 404 exception if record was not found Why do all this, when it could be simply a ...

Ideas for testing Zend Framework apps

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

Here are some ideas I was thinking of for making testing Zend Framework (and Doctrine) based apps nice and easy.

Zend_Form’s from Doctrine models: Part 2

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

Previously I wrote about my class for generating Zend_Form forms from Doctrine models. This time, let's look at some more usage examples and how it works internally, to make it easier for you to utilize it.

Autogenerating forms from Doctrine models

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

In a previous post I mentioned how Django's model forms are awesome. I really like the idea of being able to generate forms automatically from models - I mean the models already should contain most of the data you'd need: the fields, field types and how they will be stored. Since ...

Django = Awesome

Friday, May 16th, 2008

So in the lack of anything "useful" to post, and in the attemps to at least post something interesting, I shall dedicate this post to talking about what makes Django such an awesome framework! I'm going to compare it to Zend Framework, as it's the framework I'm most familiar with.

Excellent Zend Framework request-response process flowchart

Monday, May 5th, 2008

I usually don't post links to images or other stuff, but this one was just so good that I have to plug it here: A really nice flowchart showing Zend Framework's request-response process. The order where things happen in ZF is often something people ask about, so this is a big ...

Client-side validation with Zend_Form

Friday, April 4th, 2008

Zend_Form is Zend Framework's brand new tool for simplifying form creation, parsing, validation and filtering. There's one big thing I want from any kind of form generation tool: The ability to let me combine my server-side validators with JavaScript validation on the client, or other such features. And here's the thing: Zend_Form ...

Front-end performance and frameworks

Monday, March 24th, 2008

Yahoo has been researching various different techniques for improving website performance. There are a lot of obvious ones, such as making sure images are optimized, JavaScript/CSS is minified and so on. There are also a couple of less known tricks, such as putting JavaScript as the last in the document, and ...