At this year's ZendCon conference a new technology was introduced (well, and upgrade to an existing product) that allows PHP developers to create Android applications from Zend Studio 10.

ZendCon, the annual trade show for Zend, the PHP company, announced that Zend Studio 10 (Zend's IDE) will include functionalities that will let PHP developers prototype and build native mobile apps using PHP. The new capability includes a drag-and-drop mobile interface builder, integration with the Apache project's Cordova to access native mobile APIs such as those for cameras and accelerometers, and built-in PhoneGap integration for developers to publish native app packages to the various app stores.

You can see an example of the software in action here (video) and get a bit more information about the offering from this article from VentureBeat.

Pablo Viquez has a new post to his site today showing you how to debug your PHP code with the help of JMeter (an Apache project) that tests functional behavior and performance and the Zend Debugger.

Now, I think JMeter is awesome, no doubt about it, however what if I want to test something while developing a new API Endpoint? well I used to be accustom to the nasty var_dump(); exit; combination or if the API was already completed I used to do error_log() everywhere and figure out the results. [...] I love the easy integration that Zend Server has with Zend Studio for debugging and I though to myself, why not just change the client that triggers the debugging console so instead of the browser use JMeter, at the end both uses HTTP so it should work, well guess what, IT DOES, and It's awesome. No more print_r, error_log, var_dump in the API, lets do the Step by Step debugging with JMeter!

He walks you through the steps needed to get it all set up and working together, complete with screenshots. Really, you can use whatever debugger setup you prefer (with something like Xdebug) and have jMeter execute on top of that - there's no interface directly between the debugger and jMeter.

Andrew Eddie has posted a helpful tutorial for Eclipse users out there showing how to get the most our of code assist in Eclipse PDT/Zend Studio.

One of the powerful features of an IDE like Eclipse is the ability for it to "read" your code and give you some assistance about your API as you type. This could include things like class property or methods names, constants, functions, argument lists, and so on. Eclipse/PDT and ZendStudio do this by parsing a PHP class directly, but they also look at your docblocks and some other special comments where the raw PHP is not enough. This article is a bag of tricks that help you get the most out of code assistance using Eclipse/PDT or Zend Studio in those awkward corners of your code that you might have through previously inaccessible.

Among his tips are things like adding "@var" declarations to help with code completion, type hinting on methods/functions, using the "@property" annotation and using a "this" trick to override what class the IDE sees as the local object. ,/p>

If you're a Zend Studio user and have been wondering how to hook it directly into the phpcloud service from Zend, Kevin Schroeder has posted complete instructions in a new post today (complete with screenshots).

PHPCloud.com is the landing page for our new cloud offering. Using the Zend Application Fabric you can build your applications in the same environment as you will be deploying your apps to. The application is built on my.phpcloud.com and you can then deploy it onto any platform where the Fabric is supported. But how do you get started? Phpcloud.com has been built in a way where you can connect with any IDE. With Zend Studio 9 that connectivity has been built directly in to the IDE.

It's a simple six (well, technically seven) step process that involves setting up a new project, configuring some deployment options and hitting "deploy". Zend Studio makes it super simple to launch your application as many times as you need - a one-click deploy once things are all set up.

Kevin Schroeder has been working on a Zend Framework-based mobile application (Android) and ran up against a debugging issue that he would normally solve with features of his IDE, but since those weren't available on the device, he got a bit more creative.

The solution is similar to what I did with Debugging an RPC call in Zend Framework. What this does is set the cookies from the remote browser to debug on the local instance of the Zend debugger. To kick it off simply open up the URL to the debug kickoff page. That will set the cookies in your mobile browser. Then go to the page that you want to debug from your mobile phone and reload it.

He includes the code you'll need (a method to drop into your Controller) to make that debugging work. It sets up an array of cookie values and, when the page to debug is reloaded, those values will be set again and the IDE (in his case, Zend Studio) will catch them as a key to start debugging.

On the Zend Developer Zone there's a new post giving you five tips you can use to help speed up Eclipse PDT and Zend Studio if you happen to use one of those IDEs.

Eclipse Helios (3.6) includes an improved version of Eclipse PDT, labeled 2.2. It is also included in the current Zend Studio (7.1 and above). Among other enhancements, it dramatically improved the performance of code lookup-related tasks like searching references, creating a type hierarchy and even code completion.

Some of the recommendations have more to do with the system the IDE is running on, but they're helpful none the less:

• Disable virus scanners
• Use a fast storage device
• Keep your JVM up to date
• Delete the database if your experience problems
• Do not backup the database

In a new post to his blog Stanislav Malyshev talks about how Zend Studio users can get the tool to recognize new extensions by adding in stubs with PHPDocumentor markup.

If you have some extension, create stub file with PHPDOC descriptions [...] for each extension function, Studio will know to pick it up. You can put this file into Studio's prototypes directory - easiest way to find it is just write something like chdir() anywhere, select the name and press F3, the directory of the file that you'll get is the one you need.

Not wanting to have to generate all of the stubs himself, he created the Reflector script that will, when pointed at an extension, create the stub file with definitions for each method it can use. There's also the generator script that's a part of Zend Studio that works similarly.

The Zend Developer Zone has (re)posted a tutorial from Kevin Schroeder about combining Flex and the Zend Framework to create a simple application. This is the first part in a series of articles on the subject.

Given that Zend has had a professional relationship with Adobe for a while, I have been looking for the time to actually dive into what Flash was offering so I could make some kind of judgment call on it. [...] With that in mind, I would like to talk about some introductory topics on what it would take to get a basic Flash/Flex application up and running. This will be part 1 of an X part series. I don't know how many parts there will be, but I would expect that there would be a few.

He walks you through the full process of using Flash Builder 4 (a 60 day free trial is available) and Zend Studio/Eclipse PDT to set up a native environment for rapid development of Flex apps. He creates the basic "Hello World" app, showing how to connect PHP to the Flex application and a bit of additional work to get it to cooperate with a MVCed Zend Framework application too.

On the Ibuildings techPortal site today Ivo Jansch takes a look at a type formatter they've created to work with Zend Studio to more correctly format your code as per the official coding standard for the Zend Framework.

One problem we have with the current versions of Zend Studio is that its default Zend Framework formatter is not consistent with the official Zend Framework coding standard. Luckily, that can be easily fixed. Sandy Pleyte, one of our developers, created a formatting file for Zend Studio that does adhere to the formal standard. There might be a few issues here and there but we've found it to work much better than the default one in Zend Studio.

If you're a Zend Studio user and want to get a little less frustrated at the formatting it uses for your applications, download the tool and follow the instructions in the post to get it working in your IDE.

If you're a Zend Studio IDE user and are having trouble on the latest release of Apple's operating system (Snow Leopard), Davey Shafik might be able to help. In these two posts he walks you through how you can fix a crashing issue and a problem that comes up when selecting text.

For the first problem:

OSX Leopard, it has seemed for a while, like the app was decaying - growing progressively crashier the more I used it. Literally, to the point where I could use it. I think, however, I have solved the issue. [...] This just explicitly makes it use JVM 1.5, which is, after all, what it was built for.

And for the second (text selection):

If you are still using Zend Studio 5.5, and recently upgrade to Snow Leopard, you will have spotted pretty quickly there is a pretty severe display bug when selecting text. The reason for this, is that Snow Leopard only ships with Java 1.6 and 1.3 (wtf?) [...] It essentially comes down to this: Grab the Java 1.5 JDK from Leopard (original) and then tell OSX to use the 32bit version by default.

You can find out more information on the cause of this problem here.