Popular listings

Setting up the Zend Framework is easy even on shared hosts since no binaries need to be installed. But if you don't know the intricacies of Apache and PHP, certain requests can fail to work for seemingly no apparent reason.

I recently needed to port some existing php code which used Ajax over to the Zend Framework. While there are several tutorials out there with lots of details, I didn’t find a simple example that would just get me started with how to work Ajax calls into the MVC framework architecture. Eventually, I figured things out by referring to several different tutorials and doing a good amount of Googling. I decided it might be useful to have a very simple example of porting an existing Ajax app to the Zend Framework.

I've put together a database admin application using the database functionality provided by the Zend Framework. Basically, it's a generic set of classes that allows people to quickly add, edit, delete, and view data in a database table. The nice thing is that this uses the Zend_DB_Table classes, so it should presumably work with just about any database supported by the Zend Framework. I've tried this on mySQL and sqlite, and it worked just fine on both. There are some limitations of course. Right now this will only work on tables that have auto-increment primary keys. I don't quite know how this would work with databases that don't have auto-increment such as Oracle - maybe this could have support for defining the sequence that should be used when inserting data. This is a PHP5 only class due to it's reliance on the Zend Framework.

Zend_Auth provides an API for authentication and includes concrete authentication adapters for common use case scenarios. Zend_Auth is concerned only with authentication and not with authorization. Authentication is loosely defined as determining whether an entity actually is what it purports to be (i.e., identification), based on some set of credentials. Authorization, the process of deciding whether to allow an entity access to, or to perform operations upon, other entities is outside the scope of Zend_Auth.

Contrary to what my tutorial says, I'm one of those people that doesn't want to have to render my common header and footer templates in every single view script file. I prefer a standard site-wide layout script file that will display the content of the action script files within it. The Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ViewRenderer action helper is a great bit of code that automates rendering a view template based on which action has been called. This is very useful, but renders the action template, not my layout template. To solve this, I am experimenting with extending the Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ViewRenderer and overriding it so that it know about my layout template. I also prefer to use the view suffix "tpl.php" for my view scripts, so I've made my class automatically set my preferred view suffix.

I’m starting to get hooked on the Zend Framework’s abstraction to the PDO

Zend_Db_Adapter is the database API abstraction layer for the Zend Framework. Based on PDO, you can use Zend_Db_Adapter to connect to and work with any of the supported SQL database systems using the same API. These include Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and others.

Zend_Acl provides lightweight and flexible access control list (ACL) functionality and privileges management. In general, an application may utilize such functionality to control access to certain protected objects by other requesting objects.

I have been digging further into the Zend Framework and although they are not too version 1.0 yet it still feels pretty mature. I have been working on a admin interface for the ACL (Access Control List) and the cache mechanisms they supply. The ACL is initially confusing and overly complicated especially when you are trying to hand building rules.

Over the course of this tutorial, you will learn how to create a PDF document with the Zend Framework; use positioning within a PDF document; add text, graphics,shapes, and information to a PDF document; manage long blocks of text in a PDF document; and stream a dynamic PDF document to the browser.