Every developer has a toolkit of favorite tools and applications that help them develop more effectively. Being individuals, developers often differ (and in some cases, argue) about the tools they use. One of the most frequent questions I’m asked is “what are the tools you use?” and that was the genesis of this blog post. While there are many tools that I would feel lost without, I have listed the five that I see as most crucial to my ability to effectively develop software.

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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 wrote a case study about learning Zend Framework. A year after adopting it seemed like a good time to reevaluate the framework and reflect.

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July was a month of talks and travel, including speaking at OSCON and user group talks to DCPHP and PDXPHP.

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This past week saw a huge dust-up over the issue of whether or not WordPress themes are GPL. It’s not my goal to rehash the debate, or even to discuss it in particular; instead, my goal is to share some thoughts I’ve had about software licensing, and in particular, licensing going forward as a result of the WordPress theme dispute.

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I, along with others, have written on interfaces many times before but recently I had occasion to find a new thing about them that makes them really awesome. A few days ago I was tasked with implementing PHPUnit against a Zend Framework application. This application, like many others, makes use of Zend_Auth, and in doing so makes use of the Zend_Auth_Storage_Session class. The problem with unit testing is that sessions aren’t supported very well, and I ran into all kinds of challenges when I tried to use the existing functionality.

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