If you happen to be using any framework which, does not support ORM, do not get disheartened. There are atleast two projects running which can fulfill your needs at least partly or even fully.

Propel is one such venture. Another similar project is CoughPHP. You can try either of the two and definitely, it will help.

Happy Coding!!

The approach: You should have Zend Framework latest version downloaded. There are two good books, I can recommend you to purchase, with which you can start your basic building blocks.

1. Surviving the deep end is an online book where the approach of the author is excellent. If you read the few chapters available there, you will gain some idea about the framework, the MVC model and a mind to start with.

2. Zend Framework in action  is another book, on which you can depend a lot for the initial phases of coding. PHP|Architect’s Zend framework is also another book, which has some vaulable insights.

Once you have the initial concepts, have some idea about the basic APIs and usage of controllers like ZendDb, ZendAuth, ZendForm, ZendAcl, ZendView etc, the next approach will be to consult reference manual, API resources and online articles.

I know that point onwards you need no guidance, but for the initial start, the resources I provided are really good enough.

I opted for View with MERGE option so that the view keeps the indexes of the table involved. Once the view created I faced a strange problem. All the numeric and date datatype fields were converted into varbinary datatype in the view. And that become very difficult  while I was sorting the result.

Ultimately I found a way out. Using Cast option in select statement. Somehow like this.

CREATE ALGORITHM=MERGE VIEW view_name as
SELECT CAST(age as DECIMAL) as age, CAST(DOB as DATE) as DOB
FROM table1
LEFT JOIN...
....................................................

And it solved the problem.

Consider a class automobile with an instance variable no_of_wheels. Will you allow any other code to assign a value of fraction or a negative value to the member variables? It is better to declare the variable as private and use getter and setter method to control the assignment behavior. Only in this way you can achieve the truest meaning of encapsulation. Here is the pseudo code example.

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Class Automobile {
 
    private int no_of_wheels;
 
    public setWheels(int wheel_num) {
 
      this.no_of_wheels = wheel_num; //setting value to the class variables.
 
      if(this.no_of_wheels < 0) {
 
         this.no_of_wheels = 0 - this.no_of_wheels;
 
      }
 
   }
 
   public getWheels() {
 
     return this.no_of_wheels;
 
  }
 
}

I know, the question in your mind is then shall I not declare any member variable as public. Sure, you can  but ensure that it can have any range of values. If the type is boolean then safely, it can be a candidate of public access type. But I prefer keeping things private.

Please let me know if I am wrong.

Finally, the ray of hope sparked and soon extinguished. I had no way this time, but to be offensive. That paid. However all credit goes to Airtel. In my opinion the finest service provider in India. Understanding my plight, they rapidly arranged connection in just two days. From the time I complained to their support, till I got the connection, they continuously updated me on the status and found thousand solutions to every problem they came accross.

I salute Airtel and request everybody to try their service. It’s simply excellent.

Thank you Airtel.

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public static function copyFolder($source,$dest) { // recursive function
   if(is_dir( $source)) { // if its directory
           @mkdir($dest); //make it
           $d = dir($source); // create directory object
           while(FALSE!==($entry=$d->read())) { // read each file of directory
               if($entry=='.' || $entry == '..') { //exclude root and parent
                  continue;
               }
              $newentry = $source . '/' . $entry;  // get sub
              if(is_dir($newentry)) { // if sub is directory
                  self::copyFolder($newentry,$dest.'/'.$entry); // then go recursive
                  continue;
              }
              copy($newentry, $dest.'/'.$entry ); //else copy file
           }
           $d->close();
        }
        else {
          copy($source,$dest); // copy file
        }
  }

I hope this code will be a helpful contribution. Please do let me know.

What is a framework?

Say, you are going to build a web application. Regarding the web applications there are three aspects of development. One is the code which will interact with the database. That is will store and retrieve data. Then there can be code to send mail, to send or receive XML requests from other server. The next set of code build the business logic, that is builds the right query to get the data suitable for the context. The third set is the display part, that is the UI which is presented before the user. So typically a web application works in this manner.

User Requests Page —> The Page builds the logic —> interacts with the code base to get the data —> formats the data with color, border etc and displays.

Now, if you are building one web application it is ok for you to build it any way you like. But if building applications are your breads and butter then writing the same code base again and again for different applications is a los making proposition. What if, we can separate out various layers of the application and can reuse some of the layers. If we can structure the layers and can freeze it and over that structure we can build thousands of applications by altering the business logic and User Interface.

The MVC architecture:

The Model-View-Controller architecture uses the same three tier model. Here the business layer is the controller. The requests first comes to the controller and the controller interacts with model and view layer to prepare data.

Using MVC with zend framework:

To understand the usage we first need to understand the zend framework and MVC and then we need to know how we can use these two. Zend framework comes with a folder named Zend which you will get after unpacking the downloads.  This folder has some built in controllers which we can extend to build our controller logic. A controller can have several components. Like a login controller can have three components which are nothing but the action point of controllers. These components are login page, login processing and logout action. So in zend controllers and componets are separated out using ‘/’ . That is if a page request is abc.com/aa/bb then aa is the controller and bb is the component of the controller.

Installation: The installation of zend framework is easy and the common practice is putting the zend folder under a folder library. In this article we will discuss how we can keep all codes into the web folder so that we can use it in shared hosting too. But the ideal installation is keeping the fraework codes at the top of web folder.After installation you folder structure can be like this

/webfolder (document root)
/webfolder/library/zend
/webfolder/controllers
/webfolder/models
/webfolder/views
/webfolder/views/helpers

Now views/helpers folder will have all your javascript and css file and controllers folder will have all your controller script.

Create an .htaccess file in the webfolder and its content will be.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
RewriteRule .* index.php [L]

This will ensure that all requests to the website arrives at index.php and is channelized through it.

Now create a file index.php in the web folder and put these lines there.

//We will load zend loader
require_once "Zend/Loader.php";
Zend_Loader::registerAutoload();
//Create the front controller
$frontController = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
//error handling = true
$frontController->throwExceptions(true);
// set controllers directory
$frontController->setControllerDirectory('controllers');
//send request to controller
$frontController->dispatch();

So when the page request is abc.com/xxx/yy the zend front controller will pas the request to a file xxxController.php in the controllers folder. This suggest you should create a file xxxController.php in the controllers folder.

In that page your code will be

class xxxController extends Zend_Controller_Action {
public function indexAction()     {
//this method will be called when the request is abc.com/xxx or there are no components. in that case default index component is called.
}
public function yyAction() {
//our case, that is abc.com/xxx/yy . Here the xxx controller is passing the request to yy componet
}
}

Your views folder: Now the tricky thing. How the views will be controlled. For this in the views folder create a folder scripts and then create folder as per the controller name. So your views folder will have a scripts folder under it and then a xxx folder in the scripts folder. Each controllers folder will have an index.phtml file there and in this file your html will stay.

Now when you call abc.com/xxx/yy the request will pass to xxxControllers.php and then it will render the index.phtml under views/scripts/xxx folder.

This is simply an overview and then hundreds  of questions still remained. like how can I use javascript? How can I controll views? What is the role of models folder? etc.

The space is so little to discuss all. But I will continue it as a series as I myself learn the entire art. I will be learning the framework and so you, with me.

WEB EXPLORE 1.0

This package is about displaying folders and files in windows explorer style. Basically, I was learning observer-observable design pattern and somehow extended the pattern to produce this application. Since I am a very good designer, the package interface is horrible to get. Basically, you need a lot of work to get it a decent look. Regarding the class, I tried my best to keep it flexible enough for modification. You can do anything with the code as it is completely free.

GET THE WEBEXPLORE 1.0 HERE.

YAHOO BOSS SEARCH

This package uses Yahoo Boss Search API to display web and image search result. In this package too, you will experience my design skill. It’s not poor, it’s not worst, it’s simply terrible. I hope you won’t mind that and will change the design while using the class. I also tried to put an ajax example using jquery.

GET YAHOO BOSS SEARCH 1.0.1 HERE

The example is available in http://progphp.com/progress.php and you can view the source code here. This code example uses YUI code library for presentation layer and JSON for data transfer. apc_fetch function is being used to get the status from the cache. To use it fully all you need to do is to install PECL and this extension in your system. The rest is pure magic.