Zend Framework and Dojo Integration is a Knockout!

A new screencast was released today showing off the slick integration between Zend Framework and the Dojo Toolkit. This screencast also demonstrated the tooling support which Zend Studio 6.1 provides for this end. The speaker demonstrates it by constructing a simple Web application that takes advantage of the new features, like code assist, navigation, easy to use of PHP and JavaScript.

This manual presents a step by step guide for getting the Web application from scratch.

ZendCon 2008 Slides

Yesterday I gave a session about Rich Internet Application development, titled "PHP and AJAX made easier with Zend".

Ria Made Easier With Zend

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

ZPortal is Open-Sourced

The pet project I have initiated at work a while ago finally goes public.

Project's name is ZPortal and from now on it is managed under Google Code. One important fact is that the "Z" prefix indicates the framework we used to build this portal, which is Zend Framework.


As an introduction to this post I want to point on the difference between "Horizontal information" which is information that anybody has and use vs. "Vertical information" which is information that only you or your organization has. In the Enterprise2.0 era we try to take advantage of these two types of information and bring it to the user (employee) so he has much more power in his daily work. Previous solutions like Wiki are not sufficient these days as they discard the horizontal layer and lack of integration points.

So what is all about? it is about Enterprise2.0. ZPortal is a system of Web-based technologies that provides rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise. For those who are not familiar with the term Enterprise2.0 but know something about Web2.0 I recommend reading this post that compares between the two methods. Actually from a user point of view ZPortal is similar to iGoogle with small differences. First the authentication method is against Microsoft Exchange Server (it can be replaced by any authentication technique but of course this is the common way thee days) second you can add internal feeds from your company as this system runs behind the company's firewall. Third you can extend this portal to your company needs.

If I'd try to depict my environment at office I would do it like this:

Finally, I want to thank two people who are not at Zend anymore but helped allot toward this project - Seva Lapsha and Yuval Kuck.



for more details visit the new ZPortal site - http://code.google.com/p/zportal/

Eclipse PDT Bug Day

According to Eclipspedia the motivation for Eclipse Bug Day is "to help foster community outreach and growth". Since there are more and more people in the Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) community that start asking for diversity in the development side, Nick Boldt has suggested to help out and contribute patches to the project "if there's Zend folks willing to coach me...". Actually, I am very excited from his (and others) proposal, since it's the first time a group of people have stated that they want to contribute to PDT.

There are three more things that worth mentioning here:

1. I do think that PHP developers can (and should) try and contribute to this project although the core development is in Java, since trivalley this project is solely designated for them.
2. PHPEclipse people that did great on this project, should think about a way to integrate their work and help us so we will unite the forces on one platform.
3. Since people need to have some knowledge about our platform, we should supply basic design documents. The following two articles can be used for this end, ASTView and Abstract Syntax Tree.

Save the day, the bug day will be held on May 30th. Getting started bugs were tagged as "bugday" (thank you David!)

PHP and JavaScript in a Single Frame

Many tutorials and blogs written about “PHP & AJAX” and “Rich Internet Application” but take no notice of a suitable development environment. Actually now days' web application tasks involve many technologies and mechanisms that come to be pretty fast a tedious work, this automatically brings many developers to search for an IDE for PHP and JavaScript.

Yesterday, I have conducted a Zend webinar, named "Developing Rich Internet Applications using Zend Studio for Eclipse". In this Webinar I presented Zend Studio for Eclipse empowered by the Ajax Tools plug-in, I went over the installation process, project management, source editing and debugging capabilities for both PHP and JavaScript including code assist, code formatter, folding elements, server-client debugging and more.



Also I have demonstrated the usage of ZF and Dojo session debugging and with the example that was given by Ralph last week. Thanks Ralph!

Also I gave a demonstration of the integrated Mozilla editor that communicated with other parts of the broser tolling (like DOM inspector, browser console, request monitor view, JavaScript Evaluator, DOM source view, CSS view and the DOM watcher).



See you next time!

EclipseCon 2008 - Here I come...

It's time to pack two jeans and get the flight to San Fransisco- EclipseCon! here I come.

Though I am a speaker there, I am pretty wait to hear and see some of the Eclipse fellows. Like those from the Data tools platform and from the Web tools platform.

Also there are many sessions that I am eager to attend-
1. Getting started with RAP development - develop rich, AJAX-enabled web applications using the same development model as RCP.
2. Developing Python IDE on top of Eclipse DLTK Project - a set of frameworks designed to build full featured development environments for dynamic languages.
3. Getting Started with OSGi
4. Mylyn: code at the speed of thought
5. What can the WTP Snippets View do for me?
6. Eclipse Command Language

and a link to the EclipseCon sessions
http://www.eclipsecon.org/2008/index.php?page=introduction/

php Development Tools (PDT) Community News

It's funny how differently developers act in 'release cycle' vs. 'development cycle' . While during the first we are busy with users' feedback but we lack of any intellectual challenges , the latter is calm and quite but full of energy and programming disputes. PDT version 1.1 development cycle has begun and we need an extent of "noise" from our community so we won't lose our way. You are more than welcome to advise us now.


Taken from Ohloh's Eclipse PDT page

So what's keeping us busy these days?

1. Revising Modeling Techniques – Its time to catch up Eclipse's standards. We have decides that our previous modeling technique is getting oldish. So naturally we are targeting JDT's concepts with adaptation to the php dynamic binding nature (given by the DLTK project).

2. Code Manipulation – sometimes the editor should generate new code or even rewrite an existing code. This is an excellent mechanism for such kind of tasks. Also a great advantage is that we catching up JDT's standards on these capabilities as well so many of JDT's features are quickly portable to php.

3. UI enhancements – this is the part that our community should be most happy to hear about. Since infra was enhanced , more and more UI features are available. Taking for example mark occurrences, override indicators, better code completion, fast searching, quick fixes and more.

Exit Execution Paths are marked in PDT 1.1 Editor

4. Upgrading our Dependencies – While most of Eclipse 3.4 enhancements are infra related, Web Tools 3.0 brings the Ajax tools into their editor and this is automatically brings it to the php environment. Editing, browsing, launching, code assisting, folding, and more features are now available for the JavaScript side as well.

5. Unit testing – Well... maybe it won't be an interest of any of our users but still it is worth mentioning. We have tripled our unit testing to provide stability and regression testing to PDT. It seems that it also makes the whole development cycle more fun to us!