Richard Thomas has two new Solar framework posts added to his PHPJack blog - one talking about the new Firephp support integrated into the framework (similar to other frameworks) and a tip he's come across so far in using the framework.

In talking about the Firephp support:

There has been a flurry of work around Firebug recently including announcements that Zend Framework and Symfony both now have Firebug logging support through the use of the Firephp. As of this weekend Solar can be added to the list with its own support.

A quick example is included.

In the second post he looks at a simpler way to share information between all of your controllers without code duplication - adding it to the constructor of the Base controller your application is built on.

In a new post to his blog Jani Hartikainen wonders if, out of all the PHP frameworks out there, the Zend Framework is the right one for those new to the scene should be starting with.

I've heard some inexperienced PHP programmers say that Zend Framework is confusing to them. Until today, I have agreed: Zend Framework has a lot of classes and some of them are quite complex (such as Zend_Form). But does that actually make it more difficult for inexperienced programmers than other frameworks?

He argues a bit for and against, noting that the ZF docs can eb a bit thin in places but that the framework's architecture more than makes up for it (even if you're not completely sure how it works, you drop it in and it still does). He also mentions some of the hurdles they've had at his work trying to get yunger developers up to speed in their development with the framework.

Fabien Potencier has posted to the symfony blog today about a form handling enhancement they've introduced in the latest release of the framework (v1.2) - sfWidgetFormChoice.

When displaying a form, you often want the user to make a choice amongst a list of possibilities. In HTML, a choice is represented by a select tag. You can add a multiple attribute to make it accept several choices. [...] To unify all these possibilities, symfony 1.2 comes with a new widget called sfWidgetFormChoice. sfWidgetFormChoice is an abstract widget in the sense that it delegates the rendering to another widget (the renderer widget).

He includes examples of how to use the widget to make dropdowns, radio buttons, check boxes and even integrate some Javascript for handling multiple lists and autocompletes.

Stefan Koopmanschap has a recent post to his blog showing how to embed a distribution of the symfony framework in with the release of your application:

With symfony 1.0, one of the nice features was the freeze option, which allowed you to package the symfony libraries inside your project quite easily. This was very useful, for instance when deploying your project on a server where you couldn't install symfony. With symfony 1.1, it is apparently not advised anymore to use the freeze option (even though it is still available). So how should this be done then? Let's have a look...

He steps through the process, first setting up a subversion repository then putting a copy of symfony in to the lib/vendor directory and use the svn:externals to link to it.

In this new post to his blog Chris Hartjes suggests a new way to judge frameworks - how easy they make it to write unit tests against them and their resulting applications.

As a project for work gets ready for an alpha release, I've managed to eliminate all the serious bugs and now have some time for what should've been part of the project from the beginning: writing tests. [...] Since I'm using Code Igniter instead of CakePHP for this project (did I mention that I inherited the project and couldn't switch?) I started looking into the culture of testing surrounding Code Igniter. It's weaker than a newborn baby.

He tried to find anything he could use to write tests against the CodeIgniter application and finding fooStack as an easy to use tool for the job. This was what made him wonder how other frameworks stack up in the "has good unit testing functionality" category. He briefly covers four of them - CodeIgniter, Zend Framework, CakePHP and Symfony.

So now when you start comparing frameworks to each other, I think it's important you also consider how much effort has gone into creating tests for the core functionality of that framework. A well tested framework should mean far less surprises when using it.

Symfony developers out there will be happy to know that, since the release of symfony 1.1, writing unit tests for your models has been made even easier.

Writing unit tests for your Propel or Doctrine model is much more easier as of symfony 1.1. In this tutorial, you will learn some great tips and best practices to write better tests for your models.

The tutorial walks you through the creating of a simple test - evaluating a few criteria for the database contents. The entire thing is contained inside of YML files and is easily run via the sfConfig and integrated Propel functionality.

DevShed has finished off its CodeIgniter series today with this ninth part focusing on making a simple content management system with the framework.

Designed to allow programmers to create applications rapidly by utilizing the Model-View-Controller pattern, the Code Igniter framework lets you add many capabilities quickly and easily. This article will bring everything we've learned together for the creation of a content management system.

Their system combines the bits of knowledge from the previous parts (segments of specific functionality) and combining them into a MySQL-driven system to store some information about the user's favorite movies.

WebReference.com has the second part of their CakePHP introductory series posted, this time focusing on the actions in the controllers.

They talk (briefly) about how the call to the page is passed off to the controller's action and how you can get more information into it via POSTed values.

There's also a look at redirection, from action to action in a controller (or even to another one) and a look at a very handy method of sharing functions between the child controllers - a "master" parent controller (in their case, AppController).

At the end, they throw in a bit about components - module and reusable bits of functionality that can be passed around from controller to controller, action to action.

This series of articles are excerpts from the Packt book CakePHP Application Development.

On the Solar blog Paul Jones has posted about a new database adapter they included in the latest Solar framework release - one that lets you connect to master/slave MySQL setups.

With Solar, you connect to SQL databases using the Solar_Sql factory class, which returns a Solar_Sql_Adapter class for you. Most developers only need to connect to a single MySQL server. [...] However, when you get into a situation where you need to scale up, you might need a replicated MySQL database setup. In such cases, there is one "master" server that handles reads and writes, and there are one or more "slave" servers that are read-only.

The Solar_Sql_Adapter_MysqlReplicated adapter does all of the switching for you, making it as simple as dropping it in and changing your configuration to point to the master and slave servers (examples included).

The Show (the CakePHP podcast) has returned with a new show after eight months off:

It's been eight months since the last broadcast... we lost the microphones. Tune it for some babbling info on CakePHP RC3 with Nate Abele and Marc Grabanski.

You can either subscribe to their feed or download the mp3 directly to grab this latest episode.