webdevgeeks

Bill Karwin has helped thousands of people write better SQL and build stronger relational databases. Now he’s sharing his collection of antipatterns—the most common errors he’s identified in those thousands of requests for help. Most developers aren’t SQL experts, and most of the SQL that gets used is inefficient, hard to maintain, and sometimes just plain wrong. This book shows you all the common mistakes, and then leads you through the best fixes. What’s more, it shows you what’s behind these fixes, so you’ll learn a lot about relational databases along the way.

As PHP applications grow into complex object-oriented systems, developers look to create centralized components to execute repetitive tasks. These include logging, emailing, redirects, and more. The Observer pattern is a commonly used design pattern to hook such components into an application during runtime, thereby making them reusable. Since PHP 5.1, there are two interfaces built into the Standard PHP Library (SPL) that can be implemented to use the Observer pattern in your application. They are SplSubject , and SplObserver .

In this first article of the series, we will discuss about the best way (in my opinion) to structure your Zend Application in order to have maximum flexibility but also a good defined structure of the classes/files. These will be a series of tutorials which are meant to show you or guide you through developing a complex application with Zend Framework 1.10. The series consists of the following parts: a) Setting up a module based application b) Setting up helper plugins, methods & debugging with ZFD ebug c) Setting up a login page and signup page with captcha d) Setting up OpenID to login/create account e) Setting up an API to create/login an account f) Improving performance implementing Zend Cache

Schema-less database systems like MongoDB are quickly becoming popular with Web developers on account of their flexibility, simplicity and easy integration with modern Web technologies such as JSON. This article introduces you to MongoDB and shows you how to install it, set up an initial data store, and access it with PHP.

On his blog today Chris Hartjes has a new post about testing your Zend Framework application's functionality that lives behind a Zend_Auth authentication.

PHP software developers and system integrators actually play an important role in running the world’s largest web infrastructures. From Facebook, Gruner & Jahr, Kabel Deutschland and Lufthansa to a diversity of corporations, they all trust PHP and the respective systems built with it. It is not questionable that these systems provide a solid software architecture. The point of interest is how these architectures are aligned to the fast pace of changing business goals, which categories of business goals are considered during architecture creation and which means are utilised in projects. The study was conducted around December 2009/January 2010 with more than 150 respondants from the PHP community and professional PHP ISV s and is available as PDF .

The Zend Framework team announces the immediate availability of Zend Framework 1.10.5, our fifth maintenance release in the 1.10 series. This release includes around 60 bug fixes, many due to the bug hunt days held last week . You may download it from the Zend Framework site .

On the Web Builder Zone (of DZone ) Giorgio Sironi has posted an article looking at the Zend_Test component of the Zend Framework and how to use it for acceptance test-driven development .

On PHPBuilder.com there's a new tutorial on layouts in Zend Framework applications. The tools the framework gives you makes things much simpler when it comes to changing layouts and updating the general structure of your site.

It's that time of the month again! Thursday and Friday, 20-21 May 2010, Zend Framework will host its monthly bug hunt. For those of you unfamiliar with the event, each month, we organize the community to help reduce the number of open issues reported against the framework. Past events have netted over a 100 issues closed in just two days. We'd like to see that kind of momentum in this week's bug hunt. Whether they are big bugs or small bugs, remember: all bugs worthy of being squashed.

Having reached its 4th edition, the event looks back on its predecessors, specially 2009 and 2008 , which have all been an amazing success , both in attendance and in not only the quality of the topics covered and the detail in which they have been approached, but also in the fin and general good spirits that reign throughout the experience.

nWire for PHP was released about 6 months ago and it is already an indispensable tool for many professional PHP developers. nWire adds PHP code analysis and exploration capabilities to Eclipse PDT and Zend Studio. The new release improves one major area: performance. The results are radical.

If you use Zend Framework you probably used the initRoutes() function in your Initializer.php to create nice URI's and creating some different routing in your application. To create a customized route for your application you can use the Zend_Controller_Router_Route class from the Zend Framework. If you use the common syntax you have to repeatedly build routes in code for all routes in your application. This makes it not maintainable for programmers. To fix this problem we are going to use a XML file with all routing information.

Working with an off-the-shelf shopping cart usually requires a little bit of patience. Scaling an e-commerce site does have its share of problems. There is a LOT of interactivity that needs to be implemented. This can be things along the lines of generating targeted ads, sending email or charging a credit card. To charge a credit card, the ecommerce software will usually take the credit card information from the end user, put it into some form of web service request and the request is submitted to a remote system. While that web service request is taking place the process handling PHP is unable to take additional require requests to serve regular pages.

It's been over six months since the initial code release of the SimpleCloud API, and the code has come a long way since then: thanks to the efforts of Stas, Wil, and our partners, we now have a solid, well-tested, documented code base that shows off integration with Amazon, Windows Azure, and Nirvanix.

New from the Content with Style blog today there's a quick tutorial showing how to connect an application to LinkedIn with the Zend_Ouath component.

The ZendCon 2010 Call for Papers has been extended to May 17th Due to comments on the originally short time-frame allowed for the CFP , we have extended the deadline to May 17th to allow a more reasonable time for submissions. We have also clarified the speaker expenses in the updated text below.

From Mihai Corlan’s blog: As your projects grow in size and more people get involved you’ll find yourself fixing more and more bugs. When this happens, one of the best friends a developer has is the debugger. In this paper, I’ll talk about some of the workflows and tools you can use to debug Flex and PHP projects. If you want to try the steps outlined here for yourself, you’ll need Flash Builder 4, a PHP and MySQL server ( MAMP or WAMP will do just fine), Eclipse PDT , and XDebug.

May 10 – 14 2010. Free, online sessions for PHP developers interested in learning about the Adobe Flash Platform, including: What’s New in Flash Builder 4 for PHP Developers; Using Advanced Features with Flex & PHP ; and A Basic CRUD Application with Zend_AMF and Flex 4

On behalf of the Zend Framework community, I'm pleased to announce the immediate availability of Zend Framework 1.10.4, our fourth maintenance release in the 1.10 series. You can download it from our downloads page: http://framework.zend.com/download/latest This release includes approximately 50 bugfixes, the majority of which were contributed during our Bug Hunt Days two weeks ago . The fixes contributed help stabilize and improve the 1.10 series.