In a recent post on their own site, thePHP.cc has shared some of their own perspectives about the recent future of Zend announcement. For those that aren't aware, the company that acquired Zend several years ago - Rogue Wave - announced their decision to discontinue their support of the Zend Framework project.

Last week, Zeev Suraski, Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Enrico Zimuel and Dmitry Stogov, all well-known members of the international PHP community, announced that they will leave Zend, which has been part of Rogue Wave since 2015.

The stated reason is Rogue Wave's strategic decision to focus on the development of Zend Server. If you read between the lines, this implies that Rogue Wave is not going to continue or support the development of the Zend Engine (the core of PHP responsible for compiling and executing code), their IDE Zend Studio, and Zend Framework.

Of course, it is perfectly valid to make money off an Open Source project. This, however, implies at least a moral obligation to give back to said project. Rogue Wave, it seems, will now terminate the symbiotic relationship between PHP and Zend.

The author (Stefan Priebsch) talks about "lip service" not being enough when a company wants to make money from customers but aren't willing to help with the development of the underlying software. He also mentions several other Zend-related products that have a bit more quietly gotten the axe over the years since the acquisition. He wonders about the "downsizing" this could cause in the PHP community given ZF's impact and how, despite this being a large setback for the project, he sees its future as promising given the people involved and the projects around it.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney, (former) lead developer on the Zend Framework and Expressive projects, has a new post to his site looking at the future of the Zend Framework and how priorities have shifted.

For the past thirteen years, I've been either consuming Zend Framework or directly contributing to it. Since 2009, I've operated as project lead, and, since then, shepherded the version 2 and 3 releases, added Apigility to the ZF ecosystem, and helped bring middleware paradigms to the mainstream by assisting with the creation of Stratigility and coordination of the Expressiveproject.

[...] In the last three years, I have performed this work under the umbrella of Rogue Wave Software, who acquired Zend in 2015. However, Rogue Wave has recently made a strategic decision to focus its efforts on the Zend Server product of the Zend portfolio.

He also points out that the team largely responsible for the framework and building it over the years (himself, Enrico Zimuel, Zeev Suraski and Dmitry Stogo) will be leaving Rogue Wave and looking for other employment. Don't worry Zend Framework fans - they're going to do everything they can to keep the framework and its ecosystem alive! They're already looking for other sponsors (corporate or otherwise) so let Matthew know if you might be able to help!

On the Zend Blog there's a new tutorial posted that covers the situation where a user has multiple roles and you're using ACLs (access control lists). The post shows how to accomplish this with the ZendAcl component of the Zend Framework.

After covering the essentials of the ZendPermissionsAcl component (Access Control unit, Cross Cutting Concerns module, in the Zend Framework Advanced course), many students have approached me to ask, “what happens if a user has multiple roles?”

In this article I discuss the “traditional” way of handling a user who has multiple roles, and then lay out an easy approach which I simply call Mr. X.

The tutorial starts with a bit of a refresher on the use of the ZendAcl component to define the list of roles and resources (and relating the two). It also covers the "everyone" (anonymous) role and adding that into the mix. The "one user, multiple roles" issue is then solved with a multiCheck function that can verify multiple roles at once. Finally it talks about "Mr. X" and how to add that to all users, assuming that they will have the groups/roles information we need.

On the 7PHP.com site Khayrattee Wasseem has posted an interview he recently had with a member of the PHP community and lead on the Zend Framework/Zend Expressive projects: Matthew Weier O'Phinney.

This is the #39th set of PHP Interview to help aspiring PHP developers & PHP fans alike to get inspired by listening from those PHP guys who are already highly involved into the PHP Ocean and being ‘there’ taming the waves, surfing better than ever to make themselves an awesome PHP Expert both in their own eyes (for self-accomplishment) and for the PHP Community.

On the other side, this is an opportunity for new PHPers to get to know their “PHP Elders“. I hope you will derive as much fun to read my interviews as I’m having by interviewing those #PHPantastic guys.

He starts in with a brief introduction of Matthew before getting into the Q&A. Matthew answers questions about:

• his own background
• the "components" that make up Zend Framework
• their PHP 7.2 compatibility goals
• the volunteers that work with Zend on maintaining the framework
• the release process for the framework
• monolithic frameworks
• Zend Expressive v3

You can check out all of Matthew's answers to these and more questions in the full post.

On the Master Zend Framework site Matthew Setter has posted a tutorial introducing you to delegator factories and what they're useful for in Zend Framework-based applications.

Ever wanted to dynamically expand the functionality of an object which you retrieve from your dependency injection container, based on different needs, yet without creating messy, hard to maintain configurations? If so, then you're going to want to know about a powerful technique called Delegator Factories.

He starts with a brief definition of what the factories are and the basics of what they allow you to do (briefly stated, they decorate DI services from the container). He then gets into a practical example, showing the update of a script from v2 to v3 of Zend Expressive, to wrap route definitions in a delegator to handle the difference. Complete code is provided as well showing the initial version of the routing code and the application of the delegator.

On the Zend Framework blog, project lead Matthew Weier O'Phinney has posted a tutorial showing you how to set up a Homestead instance for Zend Framework thanks to a few helpful submissions from the ZF project.

Last year, we tagged: zendframework homestead integration tutorial laravel apigility zendexpressive

Link: https://framework.zend.com/blog/2018-05-16-homestead.html