Archive for November, 2007

The Zend Framework: Writing Object-Oriented PHP with Ease.

Wednesday, November 21st, 2007

Introduction

In my attempt to turn you nerds into uber-nerds, I’ve been lucky enough to get the young and talented Jon Lebensold (my right hand nerd) to bang out a few articles (and soon videos) on some of the emerging PHP technologies and working practices that take PHP into the enterprise arena.

Enterprise arena = sophisticated scalable and adaptable code.

About this article:

The following article introduces you to ‘web application frameworks’. If you don’t know what this is, read on and you soon will. But for those of you that are impatient … in a nutshell:

A web application framework is a set of code libraries (in our case, that would be libraries written in PHP) that handles/does many of the things that we typically need to do when building database driven websites.

For more details, you need to read the article.

Stefan Mischook

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The Zend Framework: Writing Object-Oriented PHP with Ease.

By: Jon Lebensold

This article aims to introduce the concept of developing a PHP application with a set of libraries that facilitate development by abstracting ones self from writing generic libraries.

We know that classes are composed of behaviours (methods) and data (properties), however their value only becomes apparent when we develop applications in layers, with different components answering different questions.

What Does a Layered Development Approach Look Like?

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What Makes a PHP Web Application?

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

Once and a while a get an email question put to me that I think many others are probably wondering about the same thing.

I got this email from Jordan:

Hi Stefan,

I am very interested in learning how to program, specifically with php. I went through all you videos which are excellent!

My main question is, after watching your videos and reading some tutorials I now understand the concepts such as variables, arrays,if statements etc., but have still have no idea how to put these together to create a web application.

I know exactly what I want the site to do but just have no idea where to begin. Where do I begin, is there something I can purchase that will guide me?

The simple answer to this is to just start writing code. Understanding PHP theoretically, is only the beginning of actually truly knowing it. Once you sit down and start writing code, things will seem to magically clear up as you go along.

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Why ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, Ruby and Cold Fusion Suck .. for web designers.

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

The article’s title (I admit,) will get some people little miffed at me. But, what can I say, the truth hurts!

Seriously, this statement is valid and is worth talking about because there are a lot of web designers out there who are considering the leap into building dynamic (database driven) web applications. And with so many choices (ASP, ASP.NET, Ruby etc …) it can be very frustrating when trying to make that choice.

Of course, I believe (and know) that PHP is the choice language/technology for web designers. But why are the other technologies not a good choice for web designers?

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What is Source Control and Why Should I Use It?

Monday, November 5th, 2007

By: Jon Lebensold

So you’ve started developing this application for a client and naturally, he or she is really pleased with your development. Six months pass. You’re called in again to add a couple features to your existing application. Unfortunately, as you begin development, changes in the source code begin to occur.

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