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
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. Edit 10.10.2008: Updated the post to reflect some minor changes in the CU_ModelForm class
Autogenerating forms from Doctrine models
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 I was already quite familiar with Doctrine’s internals, I …
Django = Awesome
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
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 help. Seen on #zftalk, image apparently courtesy of Kitpages.fr
Client-side validation with Zend_Form
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 is easily extendable to automatically generate JavaScript for …
Front-end performance and frameworks
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 “flushing early”. Flushing early basically means that when you …
Introduction to Zend_Layout (updated for ZF 1.5!)
I wrote earlier a post about the back then new Zend_Layout component in Zend Framework. It’s one of my most popular posts, so I think it’s about time for me to write an updated version which actually works in ZF 1.5’s version of Zend_Layout. We’ll look into how to get started with Zend_Layout, and we’ll also check out the new …
Tracking the user’s browsing history with PHP
There are various reasons for tracking what an user does: Keeping track of the refering page for forms, so they can be sent back to where they came from Tracking usage behavior for statistics etc. Let’s look at how we could implement a simple user tracker in PHP with Zend Framework. I’m going to write a bit of the theory …
Quick introduction to using Zend_Layout
Lately, the Zend_Layout component has been a very popular topic on #zftalk. It is indeed a very useful component, but a lot of people are having trouble understanding how it works. Adding to the confusion is the outdated documentation regarding the component proposal and the equally outdated articles about Zend/Xend_Layout. Let’s demonstrate the usage of the current Zend_Layout implementation, which …