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.
On his blog Matthew Weier O’PHinney has posted interesting note about exposing service APIs in Zend Framework.
The hubbub surrounding “Web 2.0″ is around sharing data. In the early iterations, the focus was on “mashups” — consuming existing public APIs in order to mix and match data in unique ways. Now, more often than not, I’m hearing more about exposing services for others to consume. Zend Framework makes this latter trivially easy via its various server classes.
Matthew show how to run your service. He also explains why the framework’s team recommends bootstrapping services separately from MVC application.
Matthew writes that recently we has been asked many times about how to autoload Doctrine and it’s models in Zend Framework. In his recent post we gives short and long explanation how to use Zend_Load_Autoloader to solve this problem. Read the rest of this entry →
