About a year ago, I was introduced to Zend Framework as the framework I was going to be working with almost every day. And for nearly a year now, every day I have worked closely with Zend Framework, learning it’s intricacies and dealing with its warts. I sat down in March of last year and [...]

In November of 2009, I wrote about why developers should write their own frameworks. I pointed out at the time that often developing a framework forces developers to make the kinds of architectural choices that frameworks require, which helps them better understand the architectural choices in the most popular frameworks.

Until last week, I had never experienced what must have been incredibly frustrating to most developers: the fact that the self keyword in PHP refers to the class it is located in, and not necessarily a class that extends it. I personally ran into this problem when trying to extend Zend_Auth. Being a singleton, the [...]

One of the things I’m always looking for is ways to improve performance with the applications I write. While a few applications are write-heavy, most are read-heavy: that is, reading the database is the predominant behavior (for example, this WordPress blog reads the database far more often than it writes to the database). Additionally, Zend [...]

In the last two entries, we examined creating a navigation structure with Zend_Navigation, and then we examined using that structure with the Zend Navigation View Helper. In both discussions, we focused on creating navigation items and menus, and inherently these items were available to all users regardless of access controls. But what happens when you [...]