Zend Framework University

A number of programming design patterns look very similar. One of these is the
Proxy pattern, which, at first glance, can look like a number of others:
Decorator, Flyweight, even plain old object extension. However, it has its
own niche, and it can provide some incredible flexibility for a number of
programming scenarios.

Within the Zend Framework 2 repository, I
recently performed a conversion from DocBook 4 to 5. The
latter is a more modern version of the toolchain, and offers a somewhat simpler
syntax and workflow. For example, you no longer need to track how many levels
deep you are in your chapter sections — you simply use a <section> tag. One
of the nicer changes is that you do not need to specify a doctype any more; you
simply declare XML namespaces on your root elements and continue merrily on your
way. This actually allows us to remove some actions in our build process, and
makes validation much simpler.

Interestingly, for DocBook5 being available in beta since 2005 and an official
standard since 2009, there is very little material on migrating from DocBook 4
to 5.

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Until a few years ago, there were basically two tools you could use to generate
API documentation in PHP: phpDocumentor and
Doxygen. phpDocumentor was long
considered the standard, with Doxygen getting notice when more advanced features
such as inheritance diagrams are required. However, phpDocumentor is practically
unsupported at this time (though a small group of developers is working on a new
version), and Doxygen has never had PHP as its primary concern. As such, a
number of new projects are starting to emerge as replacements.

One of these is DocBlox. I am well aware there are
several others — and indeed, I’ve tried several of them. This post is not here
to debate the merits or demerits of this or other solutions; the intention is to
introduce you to DocBlox so that you can evaluate it yourself.