Continuing in their series looking at using the Laravel PHP framework, NetTuts.com has posted this latest article focusing on the creation of "bundles" for use in Laravel-based applications.

The Laravel PHP framework offers its bundles system to allow developers to redistribute useful packages of code, or to organize applications into several “bundles” of smaller applications. In this tutorial, we will learn the ins and outs of creating and distributing bundles from scratch. A Laravel bundle has access to all of the features that the framework offers to its host application, including routing, migrations, tests, views and numerous other useful features.

They start with the "when to create a bundle?" question, a combination of the answers to four other questions (like "could others use it?" or "should this just be a library?"). From there they get into the actual code, showing you how to create a basic bundle that works with the Gravatar service to pull an image for a given email address. Also included is a sample unit test, how to implement it in the controller and a sample view that interacts with it to make it all work.

In a new post to the Zend Developer Zone today the NP-Gravatar libraries are introduced as a way to hook your application into the Gravatar web service.

Gravatar is a famous web-service for providing globally-unique avatars. Gravatar, like many other web services, has its own APIs, which are based on simple HTTP GET requests. [...] By studying and analyzing those APIs, I come up with an idea to create a Zend Framework implementation of all those Gravatar services. That resulted in NP-Gravatar package, which will be presented in this post.

The project gives you two service classes and one view helper to make the integration with the frontend simpler. He explains each library and gives a code sample of them in action - grabbing profile information, an interface to the XML-RPC service they offer and the view helper to call a simple "gravatar()" method inside of an IMG tag.