Juozas Kaziukenas shares some of his thoughts about best practices working with Zend Framework.
It’s always good to use great tools, but you need to make sure that you use them correctly, not just trying to code “just for it to work”. For this reason I decided to write down my usual list of things I mention when taking over some legacy project or just consulting someone how to start.
Jouzas brings to light most common programming mistakes of people using Zend Framework and proposes solutions. His tips cover business logic separation, use of globals, forms, response and other cases.
Domain-driven design is becoming popular paradigm among Zend Framework developers. One of elements of DDD is so called service layer. In his recent post Juozas Kaziukenas explains purpose of service layer and shows practical usage examples.
In my professional live I mostly work with enterprise web applications which are quite demanding for big layer of business logic (that’s another article I guess) and decoupling of application layers. During this year I invested quite a lot for a search of a good ways to architecture a big application and make it simply good. Quite a while ago Matthew Weier O’Phinney introduced service layer in one of his great talks about models, since then service layer become one of the key architectural component one my applications. Here I’m going to show a few examples and use cases where it’s very useful.
Doctrine is slowly getting more and more popular among Zend Framework developers. Since development of Zend_Entity is dropped in favor of Doctrine integration, it’s popularity should not be surprised. Especially that it is solid ORM-like tool. One of Doctrine integration evangelists is Jouzas Kaziukenas.
So about 3-4 months ago I completely switched to Doctrine. After evaluating possible solutions I decided to stay with Doctrine for a long time. I don’t know any other solution coming, I definitely don’t want (mainly because I don’t have time) to invest on creating my own library and Doctrine is simply awesome when you get used to it. After all this time I can say that it was a right call – Doctrine is on a way to being officially supported in Zend Framework (Symfony has it right now) and with Doctrine 2.0 (you can see a short presentation of its new features right here) it will be just a perfect tools combination.
He begun publishing series of posts about his experience in Doctrine and Zend Framework integration. First two parts of the series cover brief description of Doctrine and it’s capabilities, setting up Doctrine resource, creating database, models and executing simple query.
