VT’s Tech Blog

Zend has launched the Simple Cloud project which allows PHP developers to write Cloud based apps without having to bother about the different cloud based solutions available. This works like an abstraction layer for various cloud solutions like Amazon, Windows Azure, Rackspace Cloud Hosting and a few more.

Initially this project aims at providing standard cross-cloud simple APIs for

• File storage- including Windows Azure blobs, Rackspace Cloud Files, Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network and Amazon S3
• Document Storage- including Windows Azure tables and Amazon SimpleDB
• Simple Queues- including Amazon SQS and Windows Azure queues

From Zend’s press release, “Zend Cloud will also provide adapters for local services to make offline coding and testing against cloud services as easy as connected development.”

These APIs will be appearing soon on the Zend Framework as the Zend Cloud component. They will provide the basic functionality across the various cloud hosting services, but if you do need vendor specific functionality in your code, Zend Framework will provide vendor-specific libraries as well. They’ve already got Nirvanix, Amazon EC2, S3 and SQS covered. Microsoft’s proposed the WindowsAzure services for Zend Framework. IBM and Rackspace are also working with Zend to get their services covered. With these integrations in motion, they estimate that ZendCloud adapter with these features will be available in the Zend Framework by end of Q4.

An initial Simple Cloud API proposal and reference implementation is available now for community review and participation at http://www.simplecloud.org.

Links:

Zend Press Release – Zend Teams with IBM, Microsoft, Rackspace and Other Cloud Leaders on Open Source Initiative to Drive Cloud Application Development
MSDN Interoperability Blog – Microsoft, Zend and others announce Simple API for Cloud Application Services

Scienta ZF Debugbar is a useful tool to add to your sites running on Zend Framework to get server side information of the page being accessed. It’s quite simple to use – just download the code, place it in your PHP include path and use the following code in your bootstrap file to get the debug bar to appear at the end of your page:

$options = array(
   'database_adapter' =>  $dbAdapter, // or array of adapters
   'memory_usage' =>      TRUE, // default value shown
   'collect_view_vars' => TRUE,
   'sort_view_vars' =>    TRUE,
   'show_exceptions' =>   TRUE,
   'handle_errors' =>     FALSE
);
 
$scBar = new Scienta_Controller_Plugin_Debug($options);
$frontController = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
$frontController->registerPlugin($scBar);

The debug bar also gives you quick access to:

• the variables used in the page
• errors generated in that page
• Database queries and time taken (if you’re using the Zend DB libraries)
• the time taken to execute the script and more.

Get more information on this at the project site: http://jokke.dk/software/scientadebugbar

The latest version of the Zend Framework version 1.7 is out now. This version comes with quite a few new features and modules like support for Adobe’s AMF (Action Message Format) to enable communication between PHP and Flash, twitter, Google Book search, jQuery and Dojo support and more.

Here are some of the new features and modules:

• Zend_Amf with support for AMF0 and AMF3 protocols
• Dojo Toolkit 1.2.1
• Support for dijit editor available in the Dojo Toolkit
• Zend_Service_Twitter
• ZendX_JQuery in extras library
• Metadata API in Zend_Cache
• Google book search API in Zend_Gdata
• Support for Open Office XML documents in Zend_Search_Lucene indexer
• Performance enhancements in Zend_Loader, Zend_Controller, and server components
• Zend_ProgressBar
• Zend_Config_Writer
• ZendX_Console_Unix_Process in the extras library
• I18N improvements
  • Application wide locale for all classes
  • Data retrieving methods are now static
  • Additional cache handling methods in all I18N classes
  • Zend_Translate API simplified
• File transfer enhancements
  • Support for file elements in subforms
  • Support for multifile elements
  • Support for MAX_FILES_SIZE in form
  • Support for breaking validation chain
  • Support for translation of failure ,messages
  • New IsCompressed, IsImage, ExcludeMimeType, ExcludeExtension validators
  • Support for FileInfo extension in MimeType validator
• Zend_Db_Table_Select adapater for Zend_Paginator
• Support for custom adapters in Zend_Paginator
• More flexible handling of complex types in Zend_Soap

If you’re looking for the AMF code separately, head over to: http://framework.zend.com/download/amf where you can download the AMF package independently.

This is quite a lot of features given the short turnaround time for this release. ZF 1.6 was released just under three months previous to this release.

Download the latest version at: http://framework.zend.com/download/latest

via Devzone

Andi Gutmans has announced that Adobe will be contributing towards AMF (Action Message Format) support on Zend Framework. This will allow with apps made in Flex or Adobe Air to communicate with PHP. Earlier, libraries like AMF-PHP allowed this interaction between Flash and PHP.

Adobe’s proposal for this support on the Zend Framework can be viewed over at: http://gourl.in/1p

Andi mentions over at his blog that AMF support is targetted for the Zend Framework 1.7 version.

More over at Andi’s Blog.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Adobe Contributing AMF Support to Zend Framework
• Adobe AMF Support in Zend Framework

Federico Cargnelutti’s PHP::Impact blog has a good article which looks at the architecture of Zend Framework. He starts the article with a comparision of the Three-Tire and MVC Architecture and how MVC is used in Zend Framework. He also points out some of the cons of the framework.

“Zend Framework not only offers a solid infrastructure, but also an extensive component library. The component structure of ZF is somewhat unique, each component is designed with few dependencies on other components. This loosely-coupled architecture allows developers to use components individually.”

Read the article @: Zend Framework Architecture « PHP::Impact