Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

I’m pleased to announce the Zend Framework 1.8.0 release, the first in our
1.8 series of releases. This release marks the culmination of several
long-standing projects, as well as a formalization of many of our
recommended practices.

There are two major stories in this release: first, the addition of several
components designed to provide and promote Rapid Application Development;
second, two offerings that make using Zend Framework in the cloud easier.

There have been a number of articles on the web recently discussing the need for good code comments, in order to reduce technical debt in your projects. I’m a firm believer that commenting is crucial and so I’m compiling them here for reference.

On Keith Casey’s blog today, there is an interesting discussion on why you don’t need to worry about the Worst Developer on your team, but the 2nd worst. It goes into issues of technical debt, issues when working in a rapid release cycle, and how to make yourself aware of these issues and mitigate them.

The entrepreneurial organization TiE is hosting a competition this year to pick the top 50 emerging companies in technology. Zend Technologies was nominated for the Software category, and out of the ~1200 nominated is now one of the 34 finalists. The winners will be announced at the TiECon conference in Mid-May. Voting is open to everyone! So go cast a vote for Zend today!

Maarten Balliauw has blogged about the fact that a new project has just been released on CodePlex: PHPPowerPoint. Just like with PHPE xcel, PHPPowerPoint can be used to generate PPTX files from a PHP application. This can be done by creating an in-memory presentation that consists of slides and different shapes, which can then be written to disk using a writer (of which there’s currently only one for PowerPoint 2007).

One thing the world does not lack is PHP extensions. In fact, due to PHP ’s popularity the number of available extensions is quite dizzying. To date, Zend Server includes 77 PHP extensions that Zend considers essential or just very helpful for most PHP developers. Still, what if the one that your code uses is not among them? Or you wish to compile one of the extensions Zend Server is shipped with in a different way (against your own libraries or to support additional, less common features)? If this scenario sounds familiar to you, you may find this tutorial useful.

As multi-lingual web sites become more and more important, I
would like to show two possible ways how to translate static text snippets in
your application with Zend Framework. Zend Framework provides us with several
packages like Zend_Locale and Zend_Translate to make developer’s life easier –
but how to put these components together?

Zend is joining up with Ibuildings, Microsoft, and LeaseWeb to support the European WinPHP Challenge, and is offering up free 1 year subscriptions to Zend Server, as well as licenses to Zend Studio as prizes.

Web applications nowadays use an increasingly distributed set of resources. Find out on Content with Style how we test our MVC applications that use web services in their models.

PEAR’s Translation2 package provides a sophisticated framework for adding multi-language support to a Web application. This article takes a close look at the special features of this package, with examples of using it with both MySQL and XML data sources.