I wrote an introductory article on the Zend Framework for the german t3n-Magazin. It is published in issue #11 and covers all the stuff you should know, to get started with the Zend Framework:

• Basic knowledge about the request processing lifecycle
• Basic knowledge about the Controller/Action pattern applied in the Zend Framework
• Introduction the the MVC-Conponents
• Introduction to renderers, helpers, etc.

Enjoy your read!

Among all the free ftp-daemons out there I like Pure-FTPd the most. It’s easy to configure and has all features that are important to me (TLS support, virtual-users support, etc.). Anyway, today it was driving me crazy. I’ve been setting up a new Debian-based linux-box in VMWare and when starting Pure-FTPd it kept telling me Unable to find the ‘ftp’ account.

Google didn’t help much or at least I didn’t find anything useful. After some trial-and-error research with the configuration switches I found out that the ‘-s’ switch was responsible for the problems. Here’s what the documentation says about it:

‘-s’: The “waReZ protection”. Don’t allow anonymous users to download files owned by “ftp” (generally, files uploaded by other anonymous users) . So that uploads have to be validated by a system administrator (chown to another user) before being available for download.

Obviously the server was looking for a system-account (ftp) that didn’t exist, which is hardly suprising as I use other accounts for ftp-ing. I didn’t find any hints on configuring the account-id Pure-FTPd expects. This anti-warez thingy being just a switch, there seems to be no solution apart from creating the ‘ftp’ account. Thus I finally disabled the anti-warez feature. Maybe someone has the same problem and finds this post useful.

In March I will start to give a lecture on web programming at the University of Applied Sciences Rosenheim where I’ll be using PHP for practical application. This week I started to setup a Debian-based (Etch) web-server with PHP 5.2 in a virtual-machine with VMWare. Part of this setup was getting XDebug2 integrated. It’s really awesome and my students definitely need to learn about it. Shame on me, because I haven’t written Derick a postcard, yet.

Building went well as usual but when I tried to integrate the extension inside php.ini it was all weird. When loading it with

zend_extension=xdebug.so

the error log told me:

Failed loading xdebug.so: xdebug.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.

The extension_dir has been properly configured in php.ini and I also have the xdebug.so file in the right place. When loading Xdebug as a normal extension everything went entirely well:

extension=xdebug.so

But I need to enable it as Zend extension. Whatever. I finally used the full path to xdebug.so to load it:

zend_extension=/path/to/extension_dir/xdebug.so

That worked. But do I have to give a full path here?

Good news for all NetNewsWire fans. Newsgator’s awesome feed-reader for Mac OS is available for free since January 9th. This means no more NetNewsWire Lite! From now on FeedDemon 2.6 and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile 2.0 are also available as free download.

See their website for more information. MacMegaSite also published a detailed article on this topic.

One very important part of an IDE is the ability to debug the code you write. For web-application development you mostly need remote-debugging facilities. It’s no problem to find a good IDE offering all that for Java web-development. There’s Eclipse and it provides all sorts of features that make a developer’s life easier. For PHP development it’s much harder to find a free IDE that provides good (remote-)debugging features. There’s Zend Studio and Komodo but both aren’t free software. You get Zend Studio for about 350 EUR (~480 USD) and Komodo for 295 USD. For students Zend Studio is 25% cheaper and Komodo is 49 USD. Not free at all, isn’t it?

Approx. one year ago I tried to get a remote-debugging environment using PHPEclipse together with DBG. That was a PITA to set up and once it worked it was just awfully unstable. I figured out that the PHPEclipse people were developing a plugin to use XDebug but there didn’t seem to be much progress. So I stopped my efforts on free remote-debugging. Some weeks ago XDebug2 was released and I decided to give the remote-debugging thing one more shot. I tried PDT + XDebug2 and guess what - it worked out fine!

First of all you need a PHP installation with XDebug2. If you don’t have it installed yet (shame on you ), you can find instructions here. Your next step should be getting PDT. I tried the latest integration build. Additionally you need some plugins for XDebug-support that are only available from the PDT bugzilla:

• Prebuilt Binary of XDebug Support for V0.2.3 for PDT 1.0 I20070712
• Example Mapper V0.0.2 for XDebug 0.2.3

Once you have all that installed you can create a PHP-project in your PDT-eclipse and configure the environment (XDebug2 and PDT) for debugging. Daniel Holmström published a really good guide on how to install and set up everything in detail. If you follow his instructions you should have everything up and running within half an hour. After that you will be able to enjoy local- and remote-debugging of your PHP-scripts.

This afternoon I uploaded a bugfix release for PEAR::Date_Holidays. Thus the latest version is 0.17.1 now.

The new release contains a bugfix for bug #10220. The Date_Holidays::factory method called the setlocale() function in a way that very possibly may have broken the localization of applications using the package.

Additionally there were three new drivers/filters added for calculation of holidays for:

• Austria (driver provided by Klemens Ullmann <klemens -at- ull -dot- at>),
• England/Wales (driver provided by Tim Dodge <timmy -at- invisibles -dot- org>) and
• Ireland (driver and filter for calculation of official holidays provided by Ken Guest <ken -at- linux -dot- ie>).

Thanks to all contributors and bug reporters! If you experience any problems with this release do not hesitate to contact me or to submit a bug-report.

Recently I gave a talk about the Zend Framework. Part of that talk was an introduction to the suggested filesystem layout of projects based on the Zend Framework. I also gave hints about the configuration of the URL-rewriting to allow the mapping of requested URLs to a controller/action that would process the request. Read on to find out more about possible URL-rewriting configurations for the Zend Framework.

Continue reading ‘URL-rewriting configuration for the Zend Framework’

I finally found some time to upload the slides of my talks I gave at the International PHP conference 2007 - Spring Edition in Ludwigsburg, Germany. The slides are available on SlideShare right now and will be available as PDF download on my website soon.

It’s been a while since my last article but finally I had some time and managed to write for the german PHP-Magazin, again. To my surprise my article was even chosen as cover-topic. Yippieh! I wrote about PHP- and web-development on Mac OS X using TextMate.

TextMate is a very popular editor these days and not without reason! I used the first part of the article to introduce the reader to the command-line abilities and the main editing features. The second part covers the bundle-concept. Here I introduced the PHP-bundle and explained how to use TextMate as a powerful PHP-editor.

If you are a subscriber of the PHP-Magazin go out and look at your mailbox! My issue arrived today. If you aren’t you will have to wait until May 16th, till the magazin hits the shelves.