The Zend Framework blog has continued with its series of posts highlighting a component of the framework and some of the benefits and functionality it brings to the table. In their latest post they focus on zend-paginator for easy and automatic pagination of results.

zend-paginator is a flexible component for paginating collections of data and presenting that data to users. Pagination is a standard UI solution to manage the visualization of lists of items, like a list of posts in a blog or a list of products in an online store.

zend-paginator is very popular among Zend Framework developers, and it's often used with zend-view, thanks to the pagination control view helper zend-view provides. It can be used also with other template engines. In this article, I will demonstrate how to use it with Plates.

The tutorial starts with the Composer command to get the component pulled into your project and details what all comes with it. It then shows the creation of a custom adapter type (for "Posts"") and how to use the package to paginate through the results with an example of the output here. Then comes the example using the Plates templating framework via a "PaginatorMiddleware" middleware, a simple template using the pagination object directly and inserting the page navigation via a partial (again making use of the object but getting the values needed to build out the links).

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a new tutorial by Christopher Pitt showing you how to build a PHP server "super fast" with the help of the Icicle/http library and some event-driven programming techniques.

Event-based programming is a strange topic for PHP developers. In a language as procedural; events are little more than function calls. Nothing happens between events, and all meaningful code is still blocking.

Languages like JavaScript show us what PHP could be like if event loops were at the center. Some folks have taken these insights and coded them into event loops and HTTP servers. Today we’re going to create an HTTP server, in PHP. We’ll connect it to Apache to serve static files quickly. Everything else will pass through our PHP HTTP server, based on Icicle.

They start off showing you how to configure your Apache server to rewrite the requests (only for non-existent files) to the PHP handler. From there, he helps you get the Icicle/http library installed and create a simple HTTP server with it's included functionality. He shows how to set up routing using the LeagueRoute package and return correct HTTP response codes based on the result of the request. Finally he shows the use of the LeaguePlates library to render more complex views than just plain-text results.

Paul Jones has a new post to his site showing how to merge one of the components of the Aura framework with the templating library Plates, a part of the The League of Extraordinary PHP Packages. In this post he shows how to integrate the Plates rendering engine into the Aura.Html component for use as a view layer.

Aura has its own native PHP template package, Aura.View, a direct descendant of Savant and Solar_View, as well as a cousin to Zend_View. The v1 Aura.View package used to include a helper system. Once we realized that there was no reason to tie the helper system directly to the view system, we released the helpers as a standalone Aura.Html package. This means the helpers can be used in any PHP presentation code, framework-based or otherwise.

Plates lets you register functions against its own internal handling, referencing the different elements to be rendered. He includes a code example showing this integration and how they look used in a Plates template.