The Zend Developer Zone has posted part two of Aldemar Bernal's in-depth look at using the Zend_Acl component of the Zend Framework to manage the access control for your application.

In part one we saw how to setup our Zend_Acl instance and how to attach it to the MVC environment (by using the Front Controller Plugin), but what about setting another action for the denied access, or how does an article be edited only by its owner?, this, and some more is what we are going to see in the following examples.

This second part is broken up into a few parts:

• Using Modules
• Using Roles
• Setting the denied error action
• Using the action helper

These two tutorials are based on this proposal for the integration of Zend_Acl into the current framework is currently pending.

John De Goes (of N-Brain) let us know about a screencast he's posted on Vimeo of how he's set up the UNA Editor (Personal Edition - now free!) to work with PHP.

UNA Personal Edition includes full support for standard features of source code editors, such as syntax highlighting, auto-complete, regular expression search and replace, and external tool integration. [...] UNA Personal Edition allows developers to edit, compile, test, and execute files in any and all languages, and is a nice complement to heavyweight IDEs such as Eclipse and IntelliJ Idea.

The screencast lasts about five minutes and shows the creation of a new PHP project, how to set up a "launcher" to access the PHP online documentation right in the browser, use the built-in syntax checker PHP has (lint) and execute the current file.

If you weren't able to make it to yesterday's webinar from Zend and the Dojo group about their partnership, Matthew Weier O'Phinney is ready to hook you up with all of the details they presented.

We had our Zend Framework/Dojo integration QA today. Aside from some connectivity issues at the beginning of the presentation, things went smoothly, and there were some good questions.

He's made the slides both available for download directly and as a slideshow on Slideshare. He doesn't mention when the recording of the webinar will be out, but it shouldn't be too far off.

Michael Kimsal has put together a small page to help you get started using the phpUnderControl continuous integration system:

If you're not using phpUnderControl, you owe it to yourself to check it out, as I think 'continuous integration' will likely change the way you think of development. I've used CruiseControl in the past for PHP, but the PHP-specifics phpUnderControl brings to the project are too much to pass up.

The page mentions some of the common issues you might have in getting started - installation problem, the use of the PHP Code Sniffer and the Project Mess Detector from PHPUnit.

Raphael Stolt, with some time on his hands, set up a local copy of Xinc, the "shiny new Continuous Integration(CI) server" as hosted on the Google code site and spent some time working with it:

Since then the idea of building a Growl publisher plugin for Xinc was traveling my mind repeatedly, so the following post will break this circle and show a possible approach to build such a plugin, which can be used to notify the build result for continuously integrated projects and thereby provide an on-point/immediate feedback.

He includes the plugin class (ready for cut&paste) as well as the task definition and how to hook it all in to the Xinc build system. There's also a little example of it in action - a happy/sad indicator showing if the build failed or was a success, right there on the desktop.

In one of his latest entries, Sebastian Bergmann answers a question from another blogger about the future of software metrics and project mess detection as a part of the PHPUnit project.

When I started to work on these projects, there was no other place for me then to develop them as part of PHPUnit. [...] But the more I thought about it, I realized that these features do not belong into PHPUnit but into a suite of tools that PHPUnit is a well-integrated part of.

He did, however, include it as a part of the PHPUnit 3.2 release at that time. Now, however, there are the tools and platforms to make those tests useful outside of the PHPUnit environment and is allowing him to move it out from the testing application and on to closer integration with other software.

On PHPBuilder.com, there's a new article that takes a look at the recently introduced (well, relatively recent) combination of Flex from Adobe and PHP to create rich internet applications.

Unlike HTML and the endless number of limitations it presents, Adobe Flex provides an intuitive environment with a vast number of options. There is a large variety of events and styles that far exceed what is available with custom coding in Javascript and CSS. [...] The purpose of this article is not to familiarize you with Adobe Flex, but to demonstrate its integration with PHP.

They introduce the concept of integration with a simple little script first - a "click me" button that makes "Hello world" appear when clicked. With that knowledge in place, they move to something a little more complex - the creation of a dynamic chart from database information (code included).

Roy Ganor, a committer on the Eclipse PDT project has written up a post from an insider's perspective on the whole thing and the path that led them to a stable 1.0 release.

Today the PDT project community consists of about 30 users that are daily involved, and about 300 users that are weekly involved, and about 13,000 users that are monthly involved in the project . Remarkable! by any mean of open-source project.

He talks about initial feelings about the move towards PHP, how the community grew surrounding the project and the level of integration that the project has with both the Eclipse software and with the Eclipse community.

The Xinc project has released the latest version of their application - 1.0:

The Xinc team are proud to announce the release of Xinc 1.0. Xinc is a free open source continuous integration tool written in PHP 5. It currently supports Subversion and Phing but is extensible to work with any version control or build tool. Xinc is released under an LGPL license.

You can find out more about this library on its new home on Google Code including documentation and two example projects to learn from. You can download this latest version here.

Sebastian Bergmann quickly notes the support that's been added to Parabuild for PHPUnit:

Viewtier Systems is looking for testers of their new support for PHPUnit in their Parabuild software build and release management system. I am excited that a company such as Viewtier Systems realizes that there is a market for their product in the PHP space and adapts their tool to work well with existing tools such as PHPUnit in that space.

Parabuild is a software build and release management system that helps software teams and organizations reduce risks of project failures by providing Continuous Integration and delivering practically unbreakable nightly builds.

If you would like to sign up as a beta tester, all of the information is here.