Join Mike Pavlak, Zend Solutions Consultant, as he explores more Open Source tools to help improve the productivity of your development team and user community. Among the solutions reviewed, Mike will explore the project management system Collabtive and dig into the use cases as well as installation using common open source utilities like 7-zip and FileZilla.

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Have you been doing a little PHP and are you looking for a more information on how it interacts with IBM i? PHP trainer and guest speaker, John Valance, is just the person to help. John has more than 20 years of experience deploying applications on IBM i and working with PHP-based applications like the one at Corvette America. Join John for an in-depth discussion of some of the features you might spend days searching for and go beyond the basics of PHP!

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Have you ever visited an online store that was painfully slow? Have you come across a broken check out button or a faulty search function? What did you do? Most shoppers abandon the store when they run into problems.

Learn how Shoppimon leveraged Zend Framework 2.0 and Zend Server to build a Cloud application that finds Magento problems through a PHP-based virtual-user engine.

Presenter: Shahar Evron, CTO, Shoppimon

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Zend is proud to be a sponsor of the 2012 RightScale Conference.  The conference is the best place to learn about cloud architecture, management and solutions and hosts sessions with topics levels ranging from basic to highly-advanced technical sessions.  Learn more about best practices on the cloud, take advantage of Zero-to-Cloud traning sessions and get a FREE VIP pass to Cloud Expo on June 11-14 (00 value).

I recently added support for vagrant to the Zend Framework codebase to enable easier testing. I was motivated by some work the joind.in folks have done to get a working development environment for joind.in development using Vagrant.

Vagrant is a fantastic tool that enables you to manage and run virtual machines from the command line, including automatic provisioning of them using puppet or chef. The really cool thing about it however from my point of view is that vagrant automatically sets up the VM with a folder called /vagrant that holds the code on your local hard drive from where you started the VM. This means that you can continue to edit your code in your local editor/IDE and test it within the VM easily.

I highly recommend checking it out.

ZF1′s Vagrant set up

The Vagrant set up for ZF1 is designed for testing ZF1 against multiple PHP versions. As such it sets up a simple Ubuntu VM with the required toolchain for compiling PHP and provides a script called php-build.sh which will download and build any PHP 5.2, 5.3 or 5.4 version that you are interested in. I based this script on information in Derick Rethans’ excellent Multiple PHP versions set-up article.

One thing that I discovered was that by default, the VM cannot create symlinks in /vagrant. The way to solve this is to add the following to the Vagrantfile:

  config.vm.customize [
    "setextradata", :id, "VBoxInternal2/SharedFoldersEnableSymlinksCreate/v-root", "1"
  ]

I chose to use puppet to install the required packages and created a simple default.pp configuration. I’m sure this isn’t optimal, but it works

Running ZF1 unit tests

The process to set up ZF1 to run unit tests in a VM using PHPUnit 3.4, follow these steps:

1. Install requirements for running the VM:

• VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/)
• Ruby (http://www.ruby-lang.org/)
• Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/)

2. Checkout the ZF1 repository:

    $ svn checkout http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/standard/trunk zf1-dev
    $ cd zf1-dev

3. Start the process by running Vagrant.

    $ vagrant up

This will take a long while as it has to download a VM image and then provision it. Once it has finished, it will exit and leave you back at the command prompt.

4. SSH into the VM

    $ vagrant ssh

Vagrant sets up key-less ssh connections to the VM that “just works”

5. Build a version of PHP.

    $ php-build.sh 5.3.11

This also takes a while as it compiles PHP for you! It also installs PHPUnit 3.4 as that’s the version we need to unit test ZF1.

Each version of PHP that you compile is stored in /usr/local/php/{version number}. You can compile any version; I have 5.2.4, 5.2.12, 5.3.3 and 5.3.11 installed at the moment…

6. Select PHP to use:

   $ pe 5.3.11

pe is a handy shell function that Derick wrote that changes your PHP environment to whichever version your specify.

7. Run tests

   $ cd /vagrant/tests
   $ php runtests.php

Alternatively, you can run each component’s tests individually:

   $ phpunit --stderr -d memory_limit=-1 Zend/Acl/AclTest.php
   $ phpunit --stderr -d memory_limit=-1 Zend/Amf/AllTests.php
   (etc...)

Obviously, you repeat steps 5 through 7 for each version of PHP you want to test on.

Running unit tests on Zend Framework 1 is now considerably easier!

I would like to announce the immediate availability of Tobasco for Toddlers.  It is the diaper powder for stubborn children.  The way it works is that your child wears their diaper just as they normally would.  But prior to them putting it on you put a small amount of our special patented powder that is [...]

Well, planning for ZendCon has been underway for a while and we finally got our Call for Papers out the door!  We are following a similar process as we did last year.  We aren’t having specific tracks (which I am of the opinion are basically useless in a targeted conference like this), but we have [...]

I’m trying to do some remote debugging with PHPUnit on a remote system.  I was following the rules I had written about in a previous article but for some reason I could not get path mapping to work.  So I figured I’d ping the Studio lead developer because as soon as I did that I’d get [...]

I’ve blogged about
getting started with ZF2 modules, as well as about
ZF2 modules you can already use. But after fielding some questions recently,
I realized I should talk about why modules are important for the
ZF2 ecosystem.

Just by way of thanks, I would like to present to you panelists for the ZendCon 2012 Call for Papers advisory panel.  They will be assisting me in determining which submissions get turned into sessions. Please thank them for the hell I will put them through. Maurice Kherlakian (mkherlakian) – Damn good Zend consultant, but [...]