In this new post to the PHP::Impact blog, Federico takes a look at the architecture behind one of the PHP community's most popular frameworks - the Zend Framework.

Before we begin our exploration of the architecture of the Zend Framework (ZF), it is important to discuss how a typical MVC application is built. Examining and understanding the architecture of an MVC Web application allows you to make more contextually sound choices when building your application.

He starts with a look at a three-tier architecture (presentation, application, data) and compares that to the MVC used in the Zend Framework. He talks about how ZF is a hybrid component and infrastructure framework and the coupling that it provides between its components. He also has a few criticisms namely some performance issues from this style and the lack of a module to handle model/controller dependencies.

Thomas Weidner has posted about a method he's come up with to help protect you and your site when uploading files through the Zend_File_Transfer component from the Zend Framework.

The new Zend_File_Transfer component is growing day for day. As incredible new feature this component allows to use file validators. These are necessary to increase security and allow to define rules for file uploads (and also downloads in future).

He illustrates with a simple Zend_File_Transfer object that uses an addValidators call to limit the size of the upload to 50 KB. Other validation rules include count (the number of files to expect), extension, filessize and imagesize. Using these he makes a "more secure" upload object setting the size to 205KB, to expect five files that are all under 1MB and are of the types gif/jpg/png.

Fred Wu recently posted some of his thoughts on using the Zend Framework as a developer in other frameworks looking to expand his knowledge.

When Zend Framework was first announced, the developers have promised us one thing: extreme simplicity. I was 'extremely' excited, but it turned out that it wasn't the case. Ironically, Zend Framework is the most difficult one I have come crossed so far. I mean, as complicated as Symfony is, it has brilliant documentation and an active community to back it up.

He also comments on the level of documentation the framework has ("the documentation is often outdated, sometimes inaccurate"), the Zend_Search_Lucene component, some of what he thinks are missing components that should be in a 1.5 release, and a last jab at the naming conventions.

As the Zend Developer Zone points out, there's a new article from Erwin Early (of the i5 community) that's a shot introduction to what the Zend Framework is and some of what it entails.

The customer interest in PHP has been high and I receive numerous questions at customer events on its usage of PHP on IBM i. Many people also ask about Zend Framework. What is Zend Framework? Can I use it on i5/OS? How can I integrate the advanced functionality that Zend Framework provides?

To answer some of these questions he gives an overview of the framework - some of the components that make it up, how to place it so that Zend Core can find it, some resources about the framework and an example os its use to make a PDF with Zend_Pdf.

The IBM developerWorks site has posted a new tutorial (written up by Vikram Vaswani) about integrating your application with the Google Calendar web service.

Google Calendar allows Web application developers to access user-generated content and event information through its REST-based Developer API. PHP's SimpleXML extension and Zend's GData Library are ideal for processing the XML feeds generated by this API and using them to build customized PHP applications. This article introduces the Google Calendar Data API, demonstrates how you can use it to browse user-generated calendars; add and update calendar events; and perform keyword searches.

As mentioned, the tutorial steps you through a pretty complete interface with the Google Calendar API - everything from fetching events, adding new ones and searching your current events. He uses the GCal library to interface with the API.

On the PHP::Impact blog, there's a new post mentioning some of the problems that he (Federico) has run into when his Zend_Form forms got larger and larger - performance.

If you are using Zend_Form and your site increases in complexity and attracts more traffic, you are most likely to run into performance problems. Of course, bigger and more complex projects result in more load on your servers. [...] In this post I'll explain the problems I faced when using Zend_Form and how I managed to optimize it and improve the performance of my application.

He ran a few tests against his code and found out that one of the biggest causes of overhead was the many calls to other components in the framework to handle different parts of the output. His solution was to modify the Zend_Form_Elements component to check for dependencies before the form is executed. Pre-loading like this prevents the high-overhead (and repetitive) dynamic loading later on.

On the PHP::Impact blog, Federico Cargnelutti has posted about test-driven design, specifically with the Symfony framework.

Symfony is one of the few PHP frameworks that gives you basic tools for starting to write tests. [...] Symfony also provides an extension of this class called sfTestBrowser, designed especially for functional tests, which has all the abilities of the sfBrowser object plus some smart assert methods.

He uses this sfTestBrowser object to run an example test on a same get() call's response. It should match the regular expression of "/This is a temporary page/" but doesn't so it fails. Writing up tests like this for new parts of your application first would be considered test-driven development and the Symfony framework makes that simple.

Padraic Brady has posted about another OAuth library that he's started up, one that's ready to be integrated with the Zend Framework reborn as a Zend_OAuth component (see his proposal code).

I've spent some time over the last week, and I have completed an initial pass at writing an OAuth Consumer in PHP5. I'm biased, but it's a nice chunk of code capable of fairly routine POST based OAuth requests using either an Authorized header, or a raw url encoded POST request body. My main remaining task is final cleanup, included refactoring, rolling my final set of acceptance tests into PHPUnit from SimpleTest, and adding support for HTTP GET, RSA, and a storage API so tokens can be saved in the background rather than outside the API.

Example code is included showing how to connect to the ma.gnolia bookmarking service and grabbing the response body from the request. He has a few more things to finish up before it's ready to go (backend storage, reworking the handling of web service API interaction, etc).

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a new tutorial (from Aldemar Bernal) about some of the basic use of the Zend_Acl component of the Zend Framework.

So, what is wrong with Zend_Acl and the current MVC implementation in the Zend Framework? there is nothing wrong, it is just that it gets not too obvious for developers how to achieve an optimal integration between these two important parts of the framework.

He talks about the proposal that's out for a potential update to the component, the two key points being the front controller plugin and a new action helper. He includes some sample code showing how to set it all up including a "denied" controller to handle the failures.

On the ProDevTips blog, there's a new post showing how to bend the Zend_Db table component of the Zend Framework to your will and customize parts of it for your application.

For some time now I've been working on an administrative backend system. I quickly found the need to extend DB Table with more stuff than needed when I extended the Zend Framework, it's mostly convenience functions designed to reduce repetitive code snippets.

He illustrates with some of the custom override functions he's made including versions of updateOne, exists, fetchOne and fetchSomething.