I had a twitter/IRC exchange yesterday with Andries Seutens and Nick Belhomme regarding applications that include widgets within their layout. During the exchange, I told Andriess not to use the action() view helper, and both Andriess and Nick then asked how to implement widgets if they shouldn’t use that helper. While I ended up having an IRC exchange with Nick to give him a general idea on how to accomplish the task, I decided a longer writeup was in order.
Continue reading “Using Action Helpers To Implement Re-Usable Widgets”
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If you have hung around the PHP community for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard of MWOP , Zend Framework’s Supreme Allied Commander, the man, the myth, the legend, Mr. Matthew Weier O’Phinney. ( MWOP …see how that works?) Matthew is a busy man these days working on Zend Framework 2.0, speaking at local user groups and in all his spare time being a dad and husband. I recently caught up with up with Matthew and in between asnwering my Zend Framework tech support questions, he agreed to answer…3 Questions.
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In follow up to his post introducing Zend_Application component Matthew talks about writing custom and reusable component resources.
In my last article, I wrote about how to get started with Zend_Application, including some information about how to write resource methods, as well as listing available resource plugins. What happens when you need a re-usable resource for which there is no existing plugin shipped? Why, write your own, of course! All plugins in Zend Framework follow a common pattern. Basically, you group plugins under a common directory, with a common class prefix, and then notify the pluggable class of their location.
In his step-by-step guide he shows how create resource class following framework’s naming and coding conventions, make use of dependency tracking and make resource configurable using standard configuration files and bootstrapping mechanism.
Metthew Weier O’Phinney wrote on his blog very good quick start tutorial about Zend_Application and bootstraping ZF applications.
Zend_Application works in conjunction with Zend_Application_Bootstrap, which, as you might guess from its name, is what really does the bulk of the work for bootstrapping your application. It allows you to utilize plugin bootstrap resources, or define local bootstrap resources as class methods. The former allow for re-usability, and the latter for application-specific initialization and configuration.
Additionally, Zend_Application_Bootstrap provides for dependency tracking (i.e., if one resource depends on another, you can ensure that that other resource will be executed first), and acts as a repository for initialized resources. This means that once a resource has been bootstrapped, you can retrieve it later from the bootstrap itself.
From the tutorial one can learn what Zend_Application and Zend_Application_Bootstrap are, how to use them to configure and bootstrap Zend Framework based application, what are resources, resource dependencies and how to write resource methods. This is excellent tutorial for ZF beginners and good quick overview for more advanced users.
There is new exiting feature in Zend Server and Zend Framework – ability to real-time monitoring of Zend Framework applications.
Zend Server’s Monitor extension has some capabilities for providing more context, and does much of this by default: request and environment settings available when the error was logged, the function name and arguments provided, and a full backtrace are available for you to inspect. Additionally, the Monitor extension includes an API that allows you to trigger custom Monitor events, and you can provide additional context when doing so — such as passing objects or arrays that may help provide context when debugging.
Matthew Weier O’Phinney wrote short tutorial about using new Zend_Log_Writer_ZendMonitor and Zend Server’s capability of presenting errors logged this way.
