Namespaces in PHP introduced two new keywords:

• namespace – define a namespace
• use – Use a namespace
• use … as – Use a namespace but give it an alias name

Late static binding

Lambda functions and closures
Lambda functions, or anonymous functions as they are called in PHP, is really something I have missed in PHP. Lambda functions are very convenient to use when you are dealing with callbacks, for example:

Closures are also a very welcome addition to the language. A closure is not the same thing as an anonymous method, which seem to be a widespread misunderstanding. This is the definition from wikipedia of what a closure is:

“In computer science, a closure is a first-class function with free variables that are bound in the lexical environment. Such a function is said to be “closed over” its free variables. A closure is defined within the scope of its free variables, and the extent of those variables is at least as long as the lifetime of the closure itself.” - Wikipedia

In PHP closures will allow us to define closures like this:

Pretty sweet!

During the time, I have been thinking about what other kind of projects a document based database would be suitable for. Because my lack of imagination (or just because I was too eager to get started:)), i decided to build a simple Web CMS system using PHP and CoachDB. Pages in a CMS system are perfect for storing as documents in a document database, so it seemed like a good choice.

Building the CMS backend actually turned out to be what took the shortest time. I wanted to create a nice looking Javascript based GUI for the editors and administrators, and decided to build it using the javascript library ExtJS. I had never worked with ExtJS before (and I am more of a backend guy than a javascript frontend guy), so it took me some time to get my mind around it, but the result is sweet – ExtJS is really powerful.

The CMS is far from complete, but so far it has given me quite a few ideas for new blog posts, so stay tuned for the upcoming posts on CoachDB and ExtJS!

First we need to create the php-file that will handle the incoming RPC calls. It is not advised to put this inside the MVC structure of a Zend web application, since that will lead to unessesary complexity and overhead. The Zend people recommend that we create the JSON-RPC under /public/api/vX/, so lets create the file /public/api/v1/jsonrpc.php (if you haven’t setup your Zend MVC structure, read my blog post Getting started with the zend framework to get started).

We will have to do the regular bootstrapping to get our application up and running:

The next step is to create the class that will be exposed through the service. I will create a very simple class that will simply perform an addition of two ints. It is very important to describe the input parameters using the @param directive in the comment. This information is used by the Json Server when creating the SMD (Service Mapping Description).

The last step to get the JSON-RPC server running:

Now your JSON-RPC Server should be up running. Browsing http://{your web server}/api/v1/jsonrpc.php should result in the following SMD:

jQuery does not support calling JSON-RPC services out of the box, but fourtenly there is plenty of plugins for jquery that fixes this. One is the JSON-RPC client found here. Download the client and put the javascript files into your /js folder. Then create a new file test.html and add the following html:

We are all done! Browsing test.html should result in an alert box containg the result.

Congratulations! You have created a JSON-RPC service!

Read more about the Zend Framework:

• Creating a custom View Helper in the Zend Framework
• Friendly URLs and the Zend
• Upgrading from Zend Framework 1.7 to 1.9 – The autoloader

In Zend 1.7, and earlier versions, the autoloader was registered like this:

In Zend Framwork 1.9 this has changed slightly, you now have to register the namespaces you want to autoload:

This was the only change we needed to do to upgrade from 1.7 to 1.9, quite impressive!

Step 1 – Getting a *AMP setup (LAMP, MAMP, WAMP)
The AMP (Apache, Mysql, PHP) stack is available for almost all modern operating systems. I am writing this on my Macbook, so in this tutorial I will use MAMP. When I develop PHP in Windows I usually use WAMPServer and in Linux you can install the LAMP-stack using the packaging system in most distributions.

Setting up MAMP is pretty straightforward, download the MAMP .dmg-file and drag the MAMP folder to your Applications folder.

Start the application and press the “Open start page” button to make sure everything works. On the start page you will find information about your site, phpInfo, phpMyAdmin and SqLiteManager. We will get back to configuring the http root directory later.

Step 2 – Download and install Zend Framework
Go to the framwork download page and download the minimal distribution. In this tutorial I am using 1.9.6, but the instructions will probably apply to all 1.9 versions.

Extract the downloaded file and move the folder to a shared location, for example /usr/local/. Next step is to create an alias for the zf.sh tool. Edit your ~/.bash_profile and add the following line (change the path to where you moved the extracted files):

zf=/usr/local/ZendFramework1.9/bin/zf.sh

This will allow you execute the zf tool without using the full path. Try it out by executing zf show version, it should return the version number of the file you downloaded.


$ zf show version
Zend Framework Version: 1.9.6


Step 3 – Create your project
Go to the folder where you want to create your new project, in my case ~/Development/. Run zf create project zf-tutorial. This will setup the default directory structure and create the necessary files.

The application/ folder is where the source code for your website lives. It contains separate folder for models, views and controllers. The public/ folder is the folder that is going to be your document root.

Now you need to copy the Zend library (in my case /usr/local/ZendFramework1.9/library/Zend) or create a symlink for it so your site can find the Zend files. I prefer using a symlink:


$ cd ~/Development/zf-tutorial/library
$ ln -s /usr/local/ZendFramework1.9/library/Zend/ Zend


Step 4 – Run the project
The last step before we will have running site up is to configure the step that we skipped in Step 1, configuring the Apache document root.

Open up MAMP and click the preferences button, under the apache tab you will find the document root. Click select and navigate to the “public” folder in your zend project. Apply the settings and restart the server.

Now open your browser and direct it to http://localhost and you should see the default welcomescreen:

Now open your application/controllers/IndexController.php and start hacking your code!

If you want to learn more about the Zend Framework i have some posts on some more advanced topics:

• Creating a custom View Helper in the Zend Framework
• Friendly URLs and the Zend
• Upgrading from Zend Framework 1.7 to 1.9 – The autoloader

/popular/index/type/images/page/1/sortOrder/alltime (controller/action/var/value/var/value/var/value)

We would prefer something like this:
/popular/images/1/alltime

Luckily Zend provides a very flexible router that we can configure as we want. To start with, we create a new config file called routes.ini, and adds these lines:

routes.popular.route tells us what to match. routes.popular.defaults.* sets default values for the variables (if none are given in the url). routes.popular.reqs.* sets requirements on the variables, for example that page must be a number.

The last thing we need to do is add a few lines to our bootstrap.php:

If you want to learn more about the Zend Framework:

• Getting started with the Zend Framework
• Creating a custom View Helper in the Zend Framework
• Upgrading from Zend Framework 1.7 to 1.9 – The autoloader
]]> http://sourcecodebean.com/archives/friendly-urls-and-the-zend-router/31/feed 6 http://sourcecodebean.com/archives/creating-a-custom-view-helper-in-the-zend-framework/6 http://sourcecodebean.com/archives/creating-a-custom-view-helper-in-the-zend-framework/6#comments Sat, 14 Feb 2009 12:16:29 +0000 Peter http://sourcecodebean.com/?p=6 Zend Framework ships with several View Helpers, such as the url View Helper. Anywhere in a view script one can call $this->url() to generate a url to a certain page. For example:
1. $this->url(array(
2.   ‘module’ => ‘moduleName’,
3.   ‘action’ => ‘actionName’,
4.   ‘additionalParam’ =>‘value’))

I wanted to create my own helper, for generating paths to thumbnails, and it turned out to be really simple. Since I wanted to be able to access the helper from any module, I created the view helper class in /library/My/View/Helper/Thumbnail.php. The definition of the class looks like this:

1. class My_View_Helper_Thumbnail extends Zend_View_Helper_Abstract
2. {
3.   public function thumbnail($id, $type, $width, $height)
4.   {
5.     $thumbModel = new My_Model_Thumbnails();
6.     return $thumbModel
7.       ->getThumbnail($id, $width, $height);
8.   }
9. }

The getThumbnail() function will check if there exists a thumbnail (of size $width x $height) for the image with id $id, if one exists the path to it is returned. Otherwise the thumbnail will be generated on the fly.
The last piece of magic before it is possible to use our new view helper is to add one line to our bootstrap.php. After Zend MVC has been started, the path to our new view helper must be added to the layout in orders for view to be able to find it.

1. $layout = Zend_Layout::startMvc(APPLICATION_PATH . ‘/layouts/scripts’);
2. $layout->getView()->addHelperPath(‘My/View/Helper’, ‘My_View_Helper’);

When this is done it is possible to call $this->thumbnail() in all view scripts in the project.

]]> http://sourcecodebean.com/archives/creating-a-custom-view-helper-in-the-zend-framework/6/feed 3