The PHP Grind

Zend: Zend Studio 5.5. & Zend Platform Beta 3 Released

As seen on the Zend Developer Zone, Zend has released the latest versions of two of their products - the Zend Platform Beta 3.0 Beta and Zend Studio 5.5.

Updates to the Zend Platform include support for PHP 5.2, some installation improvements, session clustering enhancements, job queues, several performance enhancements, web service functionality, and much more. Check out the Zend website for complete information.

And the Zend Studio enhancements:

Zend Studio 5.5 is the only IDE available for professional PHP developers, encompassing all the development components necessary for the full PHP application lifecycle. Through a comprehensive set of editing, debugging, analysis, optimization and database tools, Zend Studio improves the quality of applications, speeds development cycles and simplifies complex projects.

Check out the full press release for the full scoop on the update.

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DevShed: The Basics of Implementing Adapter Objects with PHP

DevShed takes a look at another of the design patterns in a new series starting with this new tutorial - a look at the implementation of Adapter objects in PHP.

You may have already encountered situations in coding PHP applications in which you would like to use inheritance, but could not for one reason or another. Fortunately, there is an alternative for these situations that can help you achieve the same result. In this first article in a two-part series, you’ll learn about the adapter pattern.

They start off with the basics of the Adapter pattern and move quickly into the first definition of a class using them - a directory processor. Once that’s built, they show how it all works with a more practical example.

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Jamie Wong’s Blog: Effective bugfixing techniques for PHP

In his travels as a PHP developer, Jamie Wong has gathered some helpful debugging tips that are shared in this latest post to his blog.

Here are some bugfixing rules and tips I’ve learned working all these years with PHP. I emphasize mostly on fixing bugs than preventing them, which is another subject worth of its own article. I’ve moved to Rails, but I wanted to finish this post as a farewell and thanks to every article and documentation that was useful to me. Hope this is useful to you too.

Topics covered include:

• Assume nothing
• Turn Error Reporting to show all errors
• Read the error message
• Understand the bug
• “Scooby-Bug, where are you?”
• Get as much information as possible

Each has some explanation below it and, in some places, a bit of code to clarify the point.

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The Basics of Implementing Adapter Objects with PHP

You may have already encountered situations in coding PHP applications in which you would like to use inheritance but could not for one reason or another. Fortunately there is an alternative for these situations that can help you achieve the same result. In this first article in a two-part series you ll learn about the adapter pattern….

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Community News: Visustin v4 Automates PHP Flowcharting and UML Diagramming

According to this note from the International PHP Magazine website, there’s a new tool being offered by Aivosto that allows PHP developers to “reverse engineer” their code back into flow charts and UML activity diagrams.

Visustin is the ideal diagramming tool for software developers and document writers. Save your documentation efforts by automatic charting! Visustin reverse engineers your source code and visualizes it. No manual drawing is required. Your existing code is all you need. If you see a real complex case, print it out as a big mosaic and hang it on your wall.

Functionality includes the automatic creation of a optimized layout, the ability to do a multi-page printout, saving the graphs/charts/etc in various formats, run a “bulk chart” on all of your files at once, and export options including PowerPoint, out to the web, and Word.

You can get the full details on the product (as well as screenshots and a demo) from their website.

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