Zend Framework Doctrine Model Autoloader
There have been several tutorials outlining how to autoload Doctrine Models using the Zend_Loader_Autoloader. However, none of these have permitted Zend / PEAR style naming conventions for models. I prefer to use these conventions because, although it makes my model names longer, the “name-spacing” gives a certain degree of organization and order to the application.
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Epguides.com Zend Framework API
Lately I have been writing Service API’s for Zext, my Zend Framework library extension. I plan on publishing some of the more useful ones over the next couple of months on my blog. The first of the series is the Epguides.com API.
Building a PHP Publish / Subscribe System
First post in a while. I have been busy working on some large application and finishing up my Computing Science Degree. Now that the piece of paper is safely secured above my fireplace, I’ve been trying to find time to do a new post.
I have been building a large application and one of the requirements is to trigger a certain action when an event happens. For example, trigger the sending of an alert email when a database row is updated. Some programmers may be tempted to simply hard-code this functionality into the model class, however this doesn’t give very strict class encapsulation, and can quickly become un-maintainable.
I use the Dojo Javscript toolkit for most of my dynamic front-end functionality. It has implemented a publish/subscribe system using dojo.publish() and dojo.subscribe(). This article will describe the implementation of a similar system using PHP. Read the rest of this entry »
Per Module Zend_Layout
Sometimes when you are building a web application, you want to use different layouts for different parts of the site. For example, in a content management system, you may want one layout for normal users and another, completely different layout for site administrators. Read the rest of this entry »
Fakemail for Developers
The other day when I was setting up email notifications for a Zend Framework application, I stumbled across Fakemail.
From the developers website:
fakemail is a fake mail server that captures emails as files for acceptance testing. This avoids the excessive configuration of setting up a real mail server and trying to extract mail queue content.
I am quite impressed with this handy little script (written in both Python and Perl), as it works exactly as advertised: taking out the time required to properly configure a SMTP server and saving the hassle of having dozens of test messages showered across inboxes. Instead of forwarding emails on to their recipients, it simply saves a raw copy of the email to the specified directory.
The script has a windows installer that bundles the script with python and will run on all flavors of Linux and Unix assuming that they have perl or python installed.
To configure Zend_Mail use fakemail place the following in your bootstrapper or common config file:
[php]Zend_Mail::setDefaultTransport(new Zend_Mail_Transport_Smtp(‘localhost’,array(
‘port’ => 10025
)));[/php]
The ‘localhost’ variable is the address of the computer that fakemail is running on (likely the local machine). The port number is the port that is specified when fakemail is run on the command line.
For more information about fakemail, binaries, and a usage guide. Visit the developers website at Sourceforce: http://www.lastcraft.com/fakemail.php