Zend Framework University

I’ve been working on a proposal for including service locators and dependency
injection containers in Zend Framework 2.0, and one issue I’ve had is trying to
explain the basic concept to developers unfamiliar with the concepts — or with
pre-conceptions that diverge from the use cases I’m proposing.

In talking with my wife about it a week or two ago, I realized that I needed an
analogy she could understand; I was basically using her as my
rubber duck. And it turned
out to be a great idea, as it gave me some good analogies.

“Introducing phpcloud.com – The Best Way to Develop and Deploy PHP Applications in Cloud”
By Zeev Suraski, CTO and Co-founder, Zend Technologies

Event:  Open Source India’s OSI Days 2011
Date:  November 21, 2011
Location:  Nimhans Convention Center, Bengaluru
Audience:  More than 3,000 Developers and IT Managers are expected
There is no question that the cloud presents great potential for driving business value. The challenge is to find the best approach to fully leverage cloud computing, starting with the development environment. In his keynote, Zeev Suraski will introduce event attendees to phpcloud.com, a new technology platform and partner ecosystem for application development and delivery aimed at helping PHP developers build next-generation web applications in the cloud.

About Zeev Suraski

Zeev Suraski co-founded Zend Technologies in 1999 together with Zend CEO Andi Gutmans. As CTO, Zeev leads the company’s research & development teams. He was a lead contributor to PHP starting in 1997, when he and Andi developed the foundation for PHP 3. That new version was a turning point for PHP — the foundational language for leading social apps and networks including Facebook, Zynga, Drupal and Yahoo! Today PHP powers more than 20 million websites and enjoys a following of over 5 million developers. Zeev spearheaded the PHP 4 project, and contributed to PHP 5. Today, PHP is considered the most popular Web development platform in the world. He helped to establish Zend as a leading Web solutions provider, secure venture funding, and grow Zend’s presence in the European market. Zeev serves on the board of Zend Technologies and is a member of the PHP Group and the Apache Software Foundation. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. 

Zend Solution Partner OSSCube is the Organizing Partner for OSI Days 2011.

Follow Zend on Twitter (http://twitter.com/zend)
Visit us on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/ZendTechnologies)
Connect at LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/company/zend-technologies)

Zend Framework has offerred a code generation component since version 1.8, when
we started shipping Zend_Tool. Zend_CodeGenerator largely mimics PHP’s
ReflectionAPI, but does the opposite: it instead generates code.

Why might you want to generate code?

• You can use it as an assistive form of “copy and paste” for common tasks (as
  an example, it’s used in zf.sh to generate controller classes and action
  methods).
• You might want to generate code from configuration, to remove the “compile”
  phase of generating objects from configuration values. This is often done to
  improve performance in situations that rely heavily on configurable values.

Zend\CodeGenerator in the ZF2 repository is largely ported from Zend Framework
1, but also includes some functionality surrounding namespace usage and imports.
I used it this week when working on some prototypes, and found it useful enough
that I want to share some of what I’ve learned.

Cupertino, CALIF – November 15, 2011 – Zend Technologies today announced the general availability of Zend Studio 9.0, a significant update to the industry’s leading integrated development environment (IDE) for Web application developers using PHP, the dynamic language that powers more than one-third of the web. Zend Studio 9.0 brings a new level of productivity to the development and debugging of next-generation Web Applications and Services in cloud and on-premise environments.  Using Zend Studio 9.0, developers and their managers will discover better end-to-end development workflows, deep cloud integration to simplify the development and deployment of cloud-based PHP applications, and a faster, leaner Zend Studio that can easily be configured to suit individual developer needs.

Better End-to-end Development Workflows
With Zend Studio 9.0 it is quicker and easier to set up the developer environment and streamline the application lifecycle to create high-quality code, whether developers are working individually or in collaborative teams.

• Zend Studio 9.0 incorporates Git and GitHub.  Version control is critical to the success of web application development projects in today’s distributed developer environments, and Git is an open-source distributed version control system recognized for its ability to handle small to very large software development projects with speed and efficiency. GitHub is a web-based hosting service for projects that use Git.  Armed with Git/GitHub support, Zend Studio 9.0 users can bring in code from a repository to clone, share and branch it, working and collaborating more efficiently than was possible before.
• Zend Studio 9.0 features JavaScript, CSS3 and HTML5 editor improvements that help developers to write and edit client-side code more productively. Because Zend Studio is based on Eclipse, Web application developers using Zend Studio find that they can benefit from many of the enhancements delivered by the Eclipse community in Eclipse 3.7.
• Zend Studio 9.0 provides the ability to define deployment packages for use in Zend Server, the leading PHP Web application server, to ensure that code is deployed correctly and consistently.

Deep Cloud Integration
Developers in the new and fast-growing phpcloud.com community will find that Zend Studio 9.0 can seamlessly use the Zend Developer Cloud as a robust and powerful development runtime.  Zend Studio 9.0 also supports application deployment to Zend Application Fabric, an elastic cloud platform powered by Zend Server for deploying to a variety of clouds.

•  Zend Studio 9.0 helps developers take full advantage of Zend Developer Cloud, an instantly available, consistent PHP environment for superior debugging, solid productivity and team collaboration.
• A built-in Amazon Web Services (AWS) toolkit supports increased productivity in developing Web applications to run on widely-used cloud services such as Amazon EC2 and S3.
• With Zend Studio 9.0, developers can create and test deployment packages for reliable and consistent deployment to a number of Zend Application Fabric-enabled Clouds including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and IBM SmartCloud, as well as on-premise – ensuring that code is deployed correctly and consistently after hand-off to operations teams.

Zend Studio 9.0 is faster and leaner by design.
New smart product configuration enables developers to customize their IDE, easily adding and removing plug-ins such as Mylyn task-focused programming, Color themes and more, to suit individual work preferences and project requirements. As a result, Zend Studio 9.0 can provide on average a 67% faster default startup, with a 40% smaller default disk footprint and a lower memory footprint.

Customer Quotes:
Chris Jones, CTO, VP Information Technology, Shaklee Corporation
“We support a global network of 1.2 million distributors who help us ensure that the Shaklee brand is always associated with an exceptional online shopping experience in the minds of our customers. We constantly innovate our online stores, and the ability to develop and debug our PHP web applications productively is key to meeting this goal. The smart configuration in Zend Studio 9.0 gives our developers the freedom to configure the IDE to their individual needs at the start of a project, and when the work is done, Zend Studio can define deployment packages for use in Zend Server so our team can be confident that code is deployed correctly and consistently. As we consider cloud initiatives, Zend Studio 9.0 has the potential to provide our developers with some very nice options.”

James Murray, Chief Technology Officer, Boxgroove.com
“With a code base of over half a million lines of code, my developers rely on Zend Studio to stay ahead of the curve on fast-moving development projects. We found Zend Studio 9.0 to be the most responsive, feature-packed and developer-minded PHP IDE in the industry. Built-in Code Assist allows us to work with speed and accuracy, Mylyn task-focused programming helps us stay up-to-date on assigned tasks or issues, and smart product configuration makes Zend Studio 9.0 start up and run lightning fast. With the new deployment system, we can instantly and reliably deploy our applications to the Zend Developer Cloud as a staging server, before we publish to our production environment, all with the click of a button.”

Julian Somesan, CTO, DotBoost Inc.
“Zend Studio 9.0 is not only fast but it is the most feature-rich editor available for professional PHP developers. For enterprise PHP projects, it offers deep Zend Framework integration, built-in SVN and Git support, and features in the latest Eclipse releases. And did I mention that it’s fast?”

Along with Version 9.0 product enhancements, Zend Studio continues to offer developers a highly efficient PHP coding experience with features including Code Assist, code generation, refactoring, Unit testing, profiling and debugging.  Zend Studio also provides deep integration with Zend Framework for creating projects and working with MVC-architecture code. In addition, deep integration with Zend Server enables support for building deployment packages, viewing code traces, and more.  Other Zend Studio features include remote server and VMware Workstation support for the development runtime, and integrated JavaScript editing and seamless joint debugging of server-side PHP and client-side JavaScript.

Learn more about Zend Studio 9.0 PHP IDE
Video: Getting Started with Zend Studio 9.0
Webinars: Connecting to the World with Zend Studio 9.0(U.S. on Dec. 6, 2011: 9am PST, 12pm EST; Germany on Dec. 8, 2011: 10am Uhr)

Follow Zend on Twitter (http://twitter.com/zend)
Visit us on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/ZendTechnologies)
Connect at LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/company/zend-technologies)

About Zend Technologies
Zend is a partner to business for the rapid delivery of modern apps across mobile and cloud. We are the leading provider of software and services for developing, deploying and managing business-critical applications in PHP, which runs more than one-third of the world’s Web sites. Zend’s industry-leading PHP solutions, including Zend Server and Zend Studio, are deployed at more than 40,000 companies worldwide, providing a comprehensive solution for the entire application lifecycle. Learn more at www.zend.com.

Hey, just letting you guys know there’s an awesome conference happening in January: The PHPBenelux Conference 2012! They just opened up their ticket sales at really low prices, so even if you come from abroad it’s still cheap.

The PHPBenelux team only announced the names of tutorial speakers, but with names like Ivo Jansch, Torsten Rhinne, Fabien Potencier and Matthew Weier O’Phinney you know it’s going to rock! And that’s tutorials only.

It’s all happening on January 27 and 28, so make sure you block those days in your calendar, because the center of Europe is going to buzz PHP like it never had before!!! Get your tickets now while their still hot (and cheaper than cheap)!!!