On the Master Zend Framework site Matthew Setter has written up a new tutorial showing you how to migrate from Zend Expressive v1 to v2 with the help of some command line tooling support provided as a part of recent updates to the project.

In part one of this series, we started learning about the tooling support available for Zend Expressive, provided by Zend Expressive Tooling There, we learned how we can use the package to create, register, and deregister middleware, and scaffold new modules. But that's only half of what the package can do.

Here, in part two, let's learn about the other half, which removes some of the heavy lifting required when migrating Zend Expressive applications from version one to two.

He first defines some of the main differences between the two versions, a checklist of things the tooling will help you more automagically update. He talks more specifically about migration support, moving to "programatic pipelines" in Expressive v2 and scanning for deprecated error middleware. There's also information about locating the legacy request and response handling and how they're refactored to the newer format.

The Master Zend Framework site has posted a new tutorial covering an aspect of the Zend Expressive project that doesn't seem to get enough coverage: the tooling included with the skeleton application.

For the longest time, Zend Framework hasn't had the strongest command-line tooling and scaffolding support. In stark contrast, other frameworks — especially Laravel, and its excellent Artisan command — have had far stronger tooling support and as a result have been far easier to build projects with. However, that's all changed!

Since the release of Zend Expressive Skeleton 2.0.2, Zend Expressive's command-line tooling support has been rapidly developing. It's provided through a package called, aptly, Zend Expressive Tooling.

The post briefly describes what features the tooling brings and then gets right into the installation process (via Composer). The tutorial then walks you through the commands it provides to create middleware, modules and handle migration to latest versions of the framework. The module and middleware topics are then covered more in-depth, showing code and commands required.

On the Zend Framework blog Matthew Weier O'Phinney has posted a tutorial showing off some of the Expressive command line functionality that can help you rapidly develop applications using the Zend Expressive framework.

First impressions matter, particularly when you start using a new framework. As such, we're striving to improve your first tasks with Expressive. With the 2.0 release, we provided several migration tools, as well as tooling for creating, registering, and deregistering middleware modules. Each was shipped as a separate script, with little unification between them.

Today, we've pushed a unified script, expressive, which provides access to all the migration tooling, module tooling, and new tooling to help you create http-interop middleware. Our hope is to make your first few minutes with Expressive a bit easier, so you can start writing powerful applications.

The post starts with the Composer commands to create a new Expressive project and to pull in the "zendframework/zend-expressive-tooling" package to add the CLI tools to the project. It then talks briefly about what functionality the tools bring and helps you use them to create your first module, populating out the directories and files required. Next up is the creation of the middleware for a "list" action and what the resulting code ends up being. They end the post by pointing out that this is just a start to the ultimate functionality of this tool and are open to requests for new commands to add in future releases.

In case you missed it (there's been a good bit of buzz about it in the PHP community lately) there's a recent post from Jeff Atwood about the PHP language and some of his thoughts on its usefulness, it's structure and some of this thoughts on the usual "PHP sucks" kinds of articles.

Remember the immediate visceral reaction you had to the double-clawed hammer? That's exactly the reaction most sane programmers have to their first encounter with the web programming language PHP. This has been going on for years.

He talks about the the anti-PHP rants that have been happening (over and over) for years, his thoughts on it being the "worst designed mainstream 'language'" out there...and how the discussion doesn't need to be around these points anymore. It needs to be about how to get programmers to use better tooling (whether or not PHP is the right tool for the job).

Of course, there's no shortage of comments on a post like this, so be sure to go through them and see the various reactions to Jeff's thoughts.

According to this new post on the Zend Developer Zone (from Wil Sinclair) the latest Release Candidate for the upcoming Zend Framework 1.6 release has been posted - Release Candidate 1.

We couldn't be happier to announce that Zend Framework 1.6 Release Candidate 1 is now available from the Zend Framework download site!

New features include the major Dojo integration, SOAP components and updates to the functionality for unit testing, session handling, pagination, character sets and much more. Check out the full list in the Zend Developer Zone post.