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As is mentioned on Michelangelo van Dam's blog, the PHPBenelux conference for 2012 has been announced and tickets are now on sale.

During ZendCon this year, we released 2.0.0beta1 of Zend Framework.

The key story in the release is the creation of a new MVC layer, and to sweeten the story, the addition of a modular application architecture.

Ralph Schindler has a new post to his today looking back at a sort of history of autoloading and some of what we've learned even in just the journey from PHP 5.0 to 5.3 (and has become best practice in the community).

Matthew Weier O'Phinney, lead on the Zend Framework project, has a new post to his blog talking about the event manager in the Zend Framework, v2 and how to use it in a refectored version of a previous post.

Until a few years ago, there were basically two tools you could use to generate API documentation in PHP: phpDocumentor and Doxygen. phpDocumentor was long considered the standard, with Doxygen getting notice when more advanced features such as inheritance diagrams are required.

However, phpDocumentor is practically unsupported at this time (though a small group of developers is working on a new version), and Doxygen has never had PHP as its primary concern.

Within the Zend Framework 2 repository, I recently performed a conversion from DocBook 4 to 5.

The latter is a more modern version of the toolchain, and offers a somewhat simpler syntax and workflow. For example, you no longer need to track how many levels deep you are in your chapter sections -- you simply use a <section> tag.

A number of programming design patterns look very similar. One of these is the Proxy pattern, which, at first glance, can look like a number of others: Decorator, Flyweight, even plain old object extension.

However, it has its own niche, and it can provide some incredible flexibility for a number of programming scenarios.

Continue reading "Proxies in PHP"

Last week I spoke at and attended the first ever PHP Community Conference.

It was very good. It was also very different from my normal conference. I usually go for very technical stuff.

I don't often stop and smell the roses of the community or history of my chosen (by me or it I am not sure sometimes) profession.

There was a lot of community at this one.

One thing that seemed to be a hot topic at the conference was frameworks.

I've been working on a proposal for including service locators and dependency injection containers in Zend Framework 2.0, and one issue I've had is trying to explain the basic concept to developers unfamiliar with the concepts -- or with pre-conceptions that diverge from the use cases I'm proposing.

Chris Shiflett has asked the question, why don't people blog anymore?

In this age of real-time streams and dead-simple status updates, blogs often feel like the uncared-for step-child or a website; indeed, many folks are trading their blogs for pages that simply track their various lifestreams (tweets, facebook status, flickr images, and more).

While this sort of thing is trendy and interesting, it also sucks: