Dear Reader,

I’m sitting here in a session at DrupalCamp Nashville on the Vandy campus. The day has been great and the Nashville Drupelars should be commended for running such a great camp. From a conference organizer PoV, this camp has run smoothly. The Wi-Fi is rock solid, the sessions start on time and the topics have been interesting.

Bluecoast Burrito catered lunch and it was great. Not only was the food good but there was no waiting on them to replenish the food.

The facility, Owen Graduate School of Management, on the Vanderbilt campus is a great venue for events less than 150. The rooms are nice and there is power at almost every seat.

As with any camp, the speakers are a mixed bag. I have truly enjoyed several of the sessions and learned some interesting new things about Drupal. There have been however, some not so good sessions and at leat one #epochFail. That’s what you get when you go to a camp. I love that aspect, even if it means I sit through a bad session or two.

All in all though, today has been a great day. Thanks Jamie!

Until next time,
I <3 |<
=C=

Dear Reader,

I love Zend Framework. I love it so much I wrote the very first book about Zend Framework. (Note: It’s no longer the best Zend Framework book, but still, it’s a good one) I’ve written projects using it and I now find myself teaching another class on it. One of the cool things about Zend Framework is it’s cli tool, Zend_Tool. (zf) When zf works, it’s awesome. However, when it breaks, it’s a real pain in the butt. Thanks to buddies like Ralph Schindler though (the author of the tool) when it does break, I can usually get help getting it back up and running.

The latest version of zf that comes with Zend Framework 1.10.x and better is much better than previous version and it shows that Zend (well, at least Ralph) listens when people point out problems and work to solve them.

Even though it’s made great strides, setting up zf is still not seamless. To that end, here is my list of steps needed to setup zf.

My setup

I should note before I start that I am running Windows 7. This means symlinking stuff is right out and we have to resort to physically copying files around. On top of Windows 7, I’m running XAMPP. (anyone know, is that pronounced X-AMP ot ZAMP?) this means that my PHP sits in \xampp\php. I’ve added that directory to my WIndows path so I can execute php from any cmd window. With that understanding, here’s my list.

The steps

1. Download Zend Framework and unpack it somewhere on your harddrive where you want it to live.
2. Make sure php.exe is in your PATH and make sure you know where php.exe is.
3. Find the bin directory in your Zend Framework directory. In it there are 2 files, zf.bat (or zf.sh for Linux) and zf.php. Copy those to the same directory php.exe is in. (Linux users, feel free to just symlink them)
4. Your Zend Framework directory should contain a library directory, change directory into it.
5. from the library directory, test your zf to make sure it works, zf show should give you what you need.
6. Type zf --setup storage-directory On Windows 7, this will create a directory named .zf in c:\Users\<Your Profile Name>
7. Type zf --setup config-file. On WIndows 7, this will create a file .zf.ini in c:\Users<Your Profile Name>
8. Using your favorite text editor, open c:\Users\<Your Profile Name>\.zf.ini. There should only be a single line in it that contains the include_path zf will use. Add the full path to your Zend Framework directory here. It should end in “\library\”.

Test it

That’s all there is to getting it setup. (I remember the days when it took twice as long and required cursing just to get it working) To test it out, cd to any directory other than the Zend Framework directory and type zf show version That should give you the current version of the framework you have installed.

Now you are free to start using it to create projects, etc.

Small problem

There is still a problem with defining your own providers. I tried to add my twitter provider (yes, I can use zf to tweet!) and it won’t yet recognize it. I’ve brought this to Ralph’s attention and impressed upon him the importance of being to tweet from zf. I have no doubt that a solution will be forthcoming.
UPDATE
As pointed out in the comments, this has been fixed, just not documented. This page shows how to add your own providers either manually or via a command.

You can either manually add a line to your .zf.ini

basicloader.classes.0 = "My_ClassName"

or you can use zf to update itself

zf enable config.provider class-name

So now I can tweet from zf again. :)

Until next time,
I <3 |<
=C=

[Disclaimer: I use to work at Zend and still have great friends there like the lovely Nili and the walking ray of sunshine that is Andrea. That having been said, it's been a long time since they gave me any money. So the point of this disclaimer is really just so I can mention Nili and Andrea. :) ]

Dear Reader,

This weekend’s Flex project was more successful that last weeks. At least the code has survived this far without me declaring it a bust and moving on to the next project.

This week’s project involves (among other things) calling an API that returns a graphic and then displaying it on-screen. Being the Flex neophyte I am, I assumed that this was a simple call to HTTPService. Unfortunately, as I found out, that won’t work. HTTPService is designed specifically to work with APIs that return specific types of data.
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Dear Reader,

I am a web developer. It’s been over 10 years since I’ve done serious desktop application development. So when I fire up Flex Builder to write my first AIR application, it takes a while for things to start coming back to me. One of the things that is only now starting to come back is Event Driven Programming.

This past week I decided to start working on a small project to scratch a personal itch. The project itself fizzled but I learned something none-the-less. I learned how to create custom events in Flex 3.

The project required selecting a file for processing. Flex 3 has a control for actually opening the dialog box and selecting the file but no control that shows the button and the selected file name.

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Dear Reader,

After several years in the PHP Community I’ve come to realize that there are 4 major events on the PHP social calendar, tek, DPC, ZendCon and MSWDS. (Microsoft Web Development Summit) There were 3 MSWDS that took place while I was at Zend and try as I might I could not score an invite to this private party. However, last year my number came up and I was luck enough to be invited. (My thought from MSWDS08 can be found here.) While I had a good time last year, this year was an order of magnitude more interesting, fun and productive for me personally.

I met some new people

This year wasn’t just about the PHP core community, we had attendees that represented the Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress communities. I don’t think any of them were official representatives of those communities but they were developers who worked in and around those projects. It was great to meet these guys and I look forward to growing the friendships that started there.

I reconnected with old friends

There are a lot of people in the PHP community that interact with each other almost daily but we only get to see each other in person a few times a year. It was great seeing all my old friends and just hanging with them.

I was co-host this year

Those that know me well know that I’m an attention whore. I love being up in front of a crowd. So I was honored and happy this year when Karri asked me to help host the event. I got a lot more credit for the success of the event than I deserved but was happy to play my small part.

I learned a few new things

To be brief:

• Even if you don’t like installing plugins, Bing Maps makes Silverlight worth installing. It’s not a game changer but they are doing some things that Google isn’t and competition is always good.
• WebPI is continuing to grow and get better. Each time I look at this tool they have either added something new and cool or sanded down a lot of the rough edges to make it more useful.
• WordPress will run on Azure. I seriously had no idea. I can’t afford Azure just to run my blog but if they adjust the pricing a bit, this could be a serious game changer for small-time bloggers like myself.
• The more people I get to know at Microsoft, the less I’m able to despise the company. Oh sure, they patented sudo and nobody at the conference was able to do anything about those “special kind of stupid” decisions that big companies make. As long as they keep hiring people like Josh, Peter, and Karri though, it’s hard to just paint them with one big evil brush.
• Blocking irc on your “guest network” is an exercise in futility. It does no good and 30 minutes after we’ve all connected and found ways around it, we just laugh at you.

fClose()

Again, I can’t seem to say thank you enough to Karri and Tanya for all the work they did to put this summit together. Y’all were awesome hosts and we are all in your debt.

I want to say a special thanks to all the attendees. This year’s summit was great because only a few people just sat there and listened, almost everyone participated at some point. A special thanks to Keith for standing up and getting righteously pissed off because it was the right thing to do.

Most of all though, thank you Microsoft in general for asking my opinion and listening to it. Be warned though, I’m watching you. I want to see if you actually listened.

Until next time,
I <3 |<
=C=

Dear Reader,

UPDATE:
My tests were performed on a Release Candidate of the code. The final code has now been released and Ibuildings has published a benchmark of WinCache 1.0.

Those of you who follow me on twitter know that recently, I tweeted that I had installed Microsoft’s new PHP Opcode Cache, WinCache on a test machine and didn’t see much difference in performance. I then later tweeted that it was probably due to my inexperience in managing II7 and not necessarily a failing of WinCache. In between those two posts, I received 2 messages from people working with Microsoft, the most helpful being from Ruslan Yakushev. If you recognize that name it’s because he writes a lot of good stuff over at iis.net including the getting started guide for WinCache.
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Dear Reader,

[UPDATE: This contest is now over. Thanks to my friends at SQLYog for the licenses and congratulations to the winners.]

My buddies over at SQLYog asked me the other day what they could do to help spread the word about the Enterprise version fo SQLyg and how cool it is to the PHP community. (For a detailed description of how cool it is, see my recent post “SQLYog – A Superficial Review“) I told them what I tell everyone, free is good!
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Dear Reader,

I’ve been teaching a Zend Framework class this week and my students have been throwing all kinds of questions at me. Most recently, while we were discussing creating a Bootstrap class for an application a question came up about the _init* functions.

The manual states that

$bootstrap->bootstrap();

will fire all of the _init* functions in the bootstrap class. However, the question came up, in what order? Thanks to friends like Rob Allen (author of “Zend Framework in Action“), I was able to give them the answer.

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Dear Reader,

Recently, I wrote a blog post for the Ibuildings blog titled “PHP Rated Top Scripting Language by Evans Data Corp“. In it, I discuss the various aspects of a report published about Dynamic Languages. Overall, PHP came out the top rated language, however, in community, PHP ranked second. By their own admission, this was a subjective and not objective measurement.

Community is a bit more subjective. For example, the Ruby community is quite small but also very dedicated and vocal.

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Dear Reader,

Ever wonder where you could get one of those cool PHPWomen T-Shirts? Well now you don’t have to travel to a conference just to get one. Now you can order your very own from their new PHPWomen T-Shirt Shop. They have a variety of styles and colors including one just for guys to show their support for the organization.

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Dear Reader,

I’m prepping some training on Zend Framework and have been working with Zend Tool a lot. When MWOP first told me about Zend_Tool, I thought cool. and when it hit the incubator, I grabbed it. I followed the two hour install instructions…then did it again, because I missed a step. Finally I had it and zf show version didn’t throw an error. However, everything else did. It pretty much sucked.
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Dear Reader,

Seeing my recent superficial review of MySQL Workbench and knowing that I like SQLyog, my buddies over at webyog pinged me and asked if I would be interested in reviewing SQLyog also. Knowing me as they do (I’ve been a beta tester for several years) they did the one thing they knew would get my attention, they gave me an enterprise license. (Actually, they replaced the one I had and had lost)

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Dear Reader,

Ok, after I posted my original post on packaging the Zend Framework with Phar and my package.php, I had some additional thoughts. Also, reader John Douglass sent in some code to include. John, I’ve included most of your concepts but I changed up a lot of your code. Nothing personal but since we are using PHP 5.3, we might as well use the GetOpt() function.

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Dear Reader,

In preparation of an episode of boxlunchtraining.com I have been doing a lot of research into creating and using PHP’s new phar archives. While I’ve not answered all my questions yet, I’ve been able to do most of what I wanted. One of the tasks I wanted to complete was to create a phar archive for Zend Framework. Here is a very quick intro into how I did it. Most of this is just a reminder for me but if you find it useful then I’m glad.

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Dear Reader,

The Short Version

If you are installing PHP 5.3 and when you run go-pear.bat you get this:

phar "C:\xampp\php\PEAR\go-pear.phar" does not have a signature

Edit your php.ini file and find the lines:

; http://php.net/phar.require-hash
; phar.require_hash = On

Change them to :

; http://php.net/phar.require-hash
phar.require_hash = Off

Save and then run

go-pear

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