Blog

Here is a collection of articles that I have written about software development, software testing, DevOps, and developer education.

As you know from reading Malt Blue, I’m rather a Zend Framework fan. Whether it’s the controller plugins, easily adding RSS feeds to applications, configuration with Zend Config or more – I really believe it’s one of the best PHP framework choices. But well, it's a bit heavyweight. Enter Kohana!

Ever wanted to know how to take an existing Zend Framework application where you have posts, records, news or anything else stored in a data source and updated regularly, and make it available as a feed for your users that they can subscribe to?

During the recent development of the new PHP cloud development casts site, which has been developed with the Zend Framework, so much development time has been saved by using one of the simplest and arguably best features of the framework: Controller Plugins. So today I want to introduce you to them and walk you through a working plugin so you can see just how effective and efficient they can make your development workflow.

Welcome to the fourth and final part in the Zend Form Mastery with Zend Config series. Previously we looked at the basic form options, element and form wide prefixes, filters and element options. In this installment, we’re going to look at configuring Zend Validators via our XML config.

Today we move on in learning how to configure the basics of Zend Forms, such as action, method, enctype, accept, accept-charset et al with Zend Config XML. It couldn't be simpler.

When you’re working with Zend Form you keep your configuration as much out of code as you can - right? Well, if you’ve been working withZend Form for more than a little while, you know that Zend Config really makes that pretty simple - well, some of the time. In this series we look, comprehensively at how to do it all with Zend_Config.

In this, part four of the Beginning Cloud Development with cloudControl series, we're going to speed up the work we undertook with MySQL in part 2 by adding Memcached support. So easy and so very painless.

In this, part 3 of the Beginning Cloud Development with cloudControl series, we integrate mongoDB support in to our application. Honestly, nothing could be simpler than this, especially as we're using the Shanty Mongo library for Zend Framework. Read on to find out how to do it.

So you've gotten started with cloudControl; you've got a basic understanding of how to deploy with it. But today we take that further, showing you the MySQL add on and multi-environment deployment.

So you've heard all about the cloud. In the current day and age, you'd have to be living under a rock to have not encountered it by now. Whether it's Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft or Apple's iCloud, The Cloud is Everywhere! But these aren't the only options available. Introducing cloudControl.