The Cloudways blog has posted another interview with a well-known member of the PHP community today - Rob Allen, a speaker, author and open source contributor to projects like Slim and the Zend Framework.

Rob is the author of Zend Framework in Action and founder of Nineteen Feet where he provides consultancy on PHP and Zend Framework. He has vast experience in the field of PHP and in his interview with Cloudways he talks about his career, PHP 7 and what similar functionality of other language PHP can add in it.

In the interview Rob answers questions about:

• how he got into software development as a profession
• his thoughts about PHP 7
• why he wrote his "Zend Framework in Action" book
• some advice to students looking to get in to software engineering

They also talk about Rob's recent work with Swift, making REST APIs and a brief discussion about hosting PHP applications in the cloud versus a hosting provider. Check out the rest of the interview for the answers to these and other questions.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted their latest interview with a member of the PHP community. In this latest post host Cal Evans interviews Rob Allen,

Cal and Rob talk about the work that Rob has been doing for the Slim Framework and how he got involved. He also talks about some of the work he contributes to the Zend Framework (v3). They also talk about Rob's company, what he does and what kind of customers he looks for and training he provides.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the episode, be sure to subscribe to their feed or follow them on Twitter.

Continuing on in the "Can Great Apps Be Written in PHP?" series on the SitePoint PHP blog, Matthew Setter talks with Tom Oram and Rob Allen of Nineteen Feet about some of their experience with the language and some of the technology they've used (and recommend).

In our second interview, we talk to Tom Oram, who works for a small development firm in Wales and Rob Allen, from Nineteen Feet. These two developers have a solid wealth of PHP experience and knowledge and have helped me refine my ideas and approaches on many occasions.

The questions include:

• What lead you to PHP?
• What have been the highlights or redeeming features?
• Do you see yourself moving to another language in the future?
• How have you implemented deployment?
• What testing tips can you share?

Check out the full post for Tom and Rob's answers.

On 7PHP.com today they've posted the latest in their interview series with people from all across the PHP community. In this most recent post, they talk with Rob Allen, author of the "Zend Framework in Action" book and well known speaker and Zend Framework contributor.

In this edition I talked with Rob Allen who is the main author of the famous PHP book “Zend Framework in Action“. He is very passionate about the whole Zend stuffs: he’s a contributor to the Zend_Config component in Zend Framework 1, he’s a member of the Zend Framework Education Advisory Board, he keeps on with his contributions with the new Zend Framework 2 and he rambles a lot about QUALITY Zend Framework tutorials on his blog. Rob is fond of writing; his latest PHP-Advent article is “Better Than the Rest” and is also a regular conference speaker, speaking at the likes of ZendCon, PHP North West, PHP|Tek and a whole lots of places.

In the interview Rob answers questions about:

• How he got started with PHP
• His advice to beginning PHP developers and ones looking to improve themselves
• Who he works (IDE, debugging, testing)
• Some recommended resources to learning and keeping up to date
• and some of his thoughts about conferences

Jason Grimes has posted a new tutorial to his blog about integrating Zend Framework 2 with Doctrine, the powerful (and popular) ORM tool for PHP. In his example, he shows how to use them to store the album information from Rob's tutorial.

Zend Framework 2 is getting close to release, and among the changes are new ways to handle dependency injection, and new ways to work with third-party code as modules. Rob "Akrabat" Allen has updated his iconic Getting Started with Zend Framework tutorial for ZF2, and it’s a great place to start. After working through that tutorial, the next thing I wanted to do was figure out how to get the Doctrine 2 ORM up and running. This article shows how to set up and use Doctrine 2 in Zend Framework 2, by extending Rob’s Getting Started tutorial to use Doctrine instead of Zend_Db.

Using Rob's example as a starting point, he shows how to install the Doctrine modules, update the "Album" model and controller to use Doctrine instead of Zend_Db and create the entity for the Albums.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today they've posted the latest episode in their DPCRadio podcast series (as recorded at the Dutch PHP Conference 2010) - a talk from Rob Allen about working with Zend_Form (from the Zend Framework).

Zend_Form is a powerful component than can simplify form handling within your web application. Find out in this session how to make Zend_Form render and validate your form elements and ease the pain of forms on web pages.

We will look at configuration, data filters & validation and error handling. One particularly tricky area is the use of the decorator pattern to control the generated HTML when rendering the form. This session will therefore also take a detailed look at this especially powerful functionality and show how to ensure that your forms are rendered as desired.

To listen you can either use the in-page player or you can download the (rather large) mp3 to listen at your leisure. The slides for the talk can be found here.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today they've posted the latest episode of their DPC Radio podcast series (as recorded at this year's Dutch PHP Conference). This episode is Rob Allen's talk about web application deployment - "Stress-free Deployment".

This talk will concentrate on the various strategies you can use to ensure that developing and releasing new features to a live website is stress-free. Firstly we will look at how organising your source code into branches can provide confidence and allow for features to go-live in any order. We will the consider the mechanics of deploying a new version of the website to the server, ensuring that we can repeat the process the same way every time. Finally we will look at how to roll back a deployment easily and quickly when something goes wrong.

As always, you can either listen via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 (90MB!). You can also find his slides over on his blog.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today there's a new episode from their Dutch PHP Conference 2009 recordings series, Rob Allen's talk on caching and performance.

More, now than ever, websites need fast response times and be able to cope under load. As web pages contain more and more dynamically generated content, the challenge is on for PHP developers to develop efficient caching solutions. This presentation will focus on using caching techniques that can be used in a PHP project to increase the performance of a web site

Rob's talk looks at a few different means for caching and gives some "before" and "after" statistics to show how much of a difference each of them makes. You can either listen via the in-page player or you can download the mp3 directly.

Rob Allen and Juozas Kaziukenas are both wrapping up their entries for this year's WinPHP Challenge and have posted about it (and some of their thoughts on the competition) to their blogs.

From Rob:

I learnt a lot about setting up PHP in Windows. It's amazing how much easier it was the second time when I installed it on the Leaseweb server. The Web Platform Installer is very good as long as you remember to stop the IIS service before running it! It's also very odd that the installer doesn't install PEAR or PDO_ODBC. I'm very glad that it uses the exact same installer as available at windows.php.net, as it makes correcting these oversights trivial.

And from Juszas:

It’s been more than a month since this competition started, but the time ran very quickly. Today I’m going to summarize what I’ve used to create my entry and what I’ve learned. [...] I think I have done everything that was required and now will try to push this application even further. Maybe Microsoft itself will show interest in it, because what I’ve done and used has been key topics in MIX 09.

In conjunction with his participation in the WinPHP Challenge, Juozas Kaziukenas has made the effort to get Rob Allen's Zend Framework tutorial (here) up and running on his Windows Server install.

My task today was to make Rob Allen’s Zend framework tutorial project run on Windows. Some years ago such task could have been a problem, but as you will see, now it’s nothing special.

He came across a few hurdles along the way:

• Permissions on the wwwroot
• Routing in IIS
• Limitations with the MSSQL driver
• Possible file permissions issues