Using with other technologies

Since the first time I really saw and understood what Flash was and did, I've been jealous of what Flash designers could do. Beyond just the cute animations for banner ads and games, Flash designers have always had a much more fine-grained control on their environment that HTML allows for. Besides my innate inability to design anything like a usable interface, the main drawback that has kept me from exploiting Flash is I never could get my head around the "Movie Timeline" metaphor for programming. As we say back home, "It just ain't right."

I began work this week on my first project utilizing the Zend Framework. The Zend Framework, although still alpha, provides some time-saving features for PHP web application developers. The largest time-saving feature for me so far has been the Zend Controller component, which is the building block for the MVC pattern. Basically, it allows you to create controllers and handlers to process requests. For example, /admin/index gets mapped to the 'index' action of the 'admin' controller. Inside the code, all you have to do is create classes to represent each controller and functions in those classes to process the handlers. Each handler function simply outputs the desired data to the browser. Easy as pie.

As I'm not very challenged by doing monotonic and repetitive work, as the building of custom controller and model classes of the Zend Framework is, I crafted an automation solution for these two tasks using Phing. The tasks I wanted to automate were the creation of custom controller and model class by calling a build file. So I wrote two templates deriving from Zend_Controller_Action and Zend_Db_Table including some common methods used in all my controller/model classes like i.e. getModelInstance() in any custom Zend_Db_Table derivation. I could have also build my own extended base classes and let my custom controllers/models derive from them, but for the sport of it I didn't.

About six months ago Dave Dash posted a great little tutorial demonstrating how to integrate the Zend FrameworkÂ’s Search component into a Symfony application. That is exactly what I did for the ICA-AtoM archival description application that I am developing using the Symfony platform. Now that I am working on the next version of this application I have upgraded to the latest version (0.8.0) of Zend Search. This upgrade adds proximity, grouped and boolean searches as well as term rank boosting to the ICA-AtoM application. At the end of this post I have some tips to add to DaveÂ’s tutorial that anyone upgrading from older Zend Search versions should be aware of.

It is very easy to integrate other tools and components into the Zend Framework. I have already shown, how to integrate Smarty as a template engine and the ez Components to expand the selection of useful components to build your own framework based on the Zend Framework. Since the Zend Framework is currently (Preview Version 0.1.3) lacking an ORM-Layer (Object Relational Mapping), I want to show you how to integrate Propel. Propel allows you to access your database using a set of objects, providing a simple API for storing and querying data. So Propel can easily take over the model part in a MVC system. For detailled information on Propel, its dependencies on Phing and Creole and how to install it please refer to the Propel website and the User guide.

A couple of weeks ago, Google jumped into the online calendar space by launching Google Calendar (um, beta). The application is chock-full of Ajaxy goodness and plenty of features, but I'm here to talk about what you can do with your calendar data behind the scenes. Using some handy tools from the Swiss Army Knife that is the Zend Framework, I'll show you how to pull data from your Google Calendar into your site. Just for kicks, I'll also throw in a caching layer to keep things fast and reduce the network traffic between your server and Google.

When building a web site or application there comes a moment when you will most likely need to implement access restrictions. Two parts come in to play, first there is authentication (ususally implemented as username/password combination) and then authorization (or permission) to make sure a user is allowed to do what he is trying to do. LiveUser provides you with a framework to make it easy to implement both aspects. It has a container approach giving a lot of flexibility in writing your own schemes if the bundled ones do not meet your needs. All containers use a unified API that makes switching between containers as painless as possible. We will see one way to integrate the Zend Framework Controller with LiveUser.