webdevgeeks

On DZone.com today there's a new interview by Lyndsey Clevesy with Jason Gilmore looking at the Zend Framework and some of the general things to expect in coming versions.

Ben Scholzen has started a serial about modern appication design on his blog. As base of this serial he is using his blog source for demonstration.

Continuing on from his previous articles on working with REST in Zend Framework applications (and making the endpoints for a web service) Matthew Weier O'Phinney has a new tutorial with the next logical step in the series, automatically responding to different content types in your application based on the content-type the client sends.

There has been a lot of talk over the past several years about the difference between performance and scalability. Never mind that the difference between the two will probably not really affect most developers. Never mind that the “difference between performance and scalability” argument is often used when someone’s code performs poorly and their best argument is “Yeah, but my code scales”. Yeah, sure it does.

The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) specification provides a way to programmatically generate images using vector paths expressed in XML. This makes it ideal for generating images that need to be scaled to different resolutions without losing fidelity. A common requirement in Web applications is to dynamically generate charts and graphs from numerical data. If these graphs are expressed using SVG, they can be blown up to different sizes without any deterioration in quality, and they are also typically smaller in size as compared to their GIF or JPEG counterparts. With this in mind, this article examines various open source PHP libraries that allow you to add SVG charting capabilities to your PHP application.

Michael Kimsal has a new post today looking at using Doctrine models in a Zend Framework application and how to get them to autoload when you need them with the help of Zend's Zend_Loader_Autoloader.

If you've been using the Zend Framework on a Windows platform (running IIS as the web server) and have been getting some 500 errors and have been left lacking the detail you need on the problem, you should read this new post from Rob Allen about an IIS setting that can help you out.

This FREE event will help you learn how to leverage the power of the IBM i platform to develop, deploy and manage web applications. The Virtual Conference has the advantages of a traditional conference without any of the travel time and cost! Attend an educational session, ask questions, visit a trade show booth, interact with other industry professionals and pick up valuable literature – all from the comfort of your office!

While there are many major security issues possible in a web application, there is a particular one that bugged me for some time. The Identity theft - Broken account and session management issue. Why can one so easily still my session id cookie and suddenly gain access to my account in one particular web application? I know it its rather impossible to make this 100% hack-proof but I strongly believe that the system should be improved as much as possible. Our goal is to implement a Zend Auth extension that adds a new level of security to the previously mentioned class. This extension - let's call it Project_Application_Auth - would check the Zend Auth storage for the IP and/or User Agent. In order to do so, these should be set in the login process in the storage. If the IP is different then the initial IP from the login process and / or the User Agent is not the same as the initial User Agent from the login process, then our extension would tell us that it is not a secure identity (aka it is safe to assume it has been stolen) and thus we should disconnect the user.

Juozas Kaziukenas has a suggestion for all of those developers (and web applications) out there that are still resting back on their comfort zone of PHP 5.2 - don't be afraid of PHP 5.3 , the earlier the adoption the better!

On ZendCasts.com today there's a new screencast aimed at showing off custom Zend_Form decorators for your Zend Framework application.

With Adobe’s latest incarnation of the Flex Framework and the Flash Builder integrated development environment ( IDE ), creating truly engaging front-end clients is now more streamlined. Some of the useful tools and features covered in this article are the Data/Services, Test Operation, and Network Monitor additions to Flash Builder. In this article, I explain how to set up a simple Representational State Transfer ( REST ) service using the Zend Framework 1.9 locally and connect to it in the Flex 4 application.

API for managing nested sets of data stored in a database. NestedSetDbTable class extends Zend_Db_Table_Abstract, to provide custom functionality for working with database tables that has hierarchical data in them data.

As mentioned on the main PHP site today, the latest version in the PHP 5.2 series has been released - PHP 5.2.13 .

In a new post to his blog Padraic Brady takes a humorous look at benchmarking PHP frameworks in a response to some of the other recent posts from developers on the Symfony and Solar frameworks.

A few version back the Zend Framework introduced a handy component that can help you get a Zend Framework started quickly - Zend_Tool (and the command line "zf"). It works like a charm on unix-based systems, but has some quirks about it on Windows. To help with the situation, Cal Evans has posted a guide on Zend_Tool and how he got it working on his Windows 7 platform.

On behalf of the Zend Framework community, I'm pleased to announce the immediate availability of Zend Framework 1.10.2, our second 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 last week (more information on that in the days to come). The fixes contributed are helping stabilize and improve this release.

With the new release of Zend Server 5 hot off the presses, Kevin Schroeder posted a video of his 4 Minute and 37 Second install of the new release onto a Linux install. He obviously spared no expense and provides background music for your development efforts.

Zend announced today the General Availability of Zend Server 5.0. As stated in the press release, the new version delivers increased performance, faster problem resolution, and adds job queuing and includes support for PHP 5.3. "Zend Server 5.0 is a huge step forward for businesses running business-critical PHP Web applications,” said Andi Gutmans, CEO and co-founder at Zend. “With this new version we are delivering application monitoring and diagnostics as part of the base application server at no additional cost. The new Code Tracing technology revolutionizes how businesses can reduce time spent on problem resolution. This and other enhancements will help businesses deliver reliable high-performance applications and maximize end-user satisfaction while reducing development and management time and costs."

Zend Server 5 takes PHP performance and troubleshooting to a new level. With job queue you can schedule recurring tasks or offload long-running scripts to other servers for improved resource utilization. With code tracing you can quickly debug issues without having to reproduce problems, even when they occur in production! Join us for a walkthrough and live demonstrations of the Zend Server 5 on February 25, at 9AM PST .