Blog

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

There are a lot of ways to traverse data in PHP, including while, do while, for and foreach loops. These are fine in a lot of cases. But what if you want to reuse looping logic or have somewhat complex logic? Enter the FilterIterator.

Whether you're a casual freelance php developer or running a professional freelance business, you'll know just how much work can be involved. Not only do you have applications to design, develop and support. But you've also got business functions such as marketing, advertising, finances and networking as well. In this post we show you a tool to massively reduce your workload - FreeAgent.

So many of us are great technically, but find the prospect of running a freelance business anything from difficult to down right scary. So we're aiming for Malt Blue to become a key resource for Starting, Building and Growing a Successful PHP Freelance Business.

Ship-It - Even if it Sucks!

August 23, 2012

Whether it’s The Cloud, Mobile Development, HTML5, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Search, Big Data, Queuing or more, we know there’s a wealth of possibility of what we can do. But we then seem to combine that with a misplaced, seemingly schizophrenic, need to be able to do it all and then not ship it until it’s perfect Today we discuss the Ship-It! attitude

In today's post, we look at one of the simplest and most effective components of the Zend Framework that allows us to create extendable and extensible Zend Framework applications - Zend Application Resource Plugins (combined with the Strategy Pattern). If you want to ensure your apps can grow without heartache, read on.

If you've been using Zend Forms for any length of time, you'll know just how flexible and configurable they are. There's not much that you can't do with them, But it's not always easy and there are catches. Today we look at ensuring that module-based Zend Forms using the ViewScript decorator can always be initialised no matter what.

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.