The Zend Framework in Practice

Books or articles about PHP or JavaScript have usually been pitched at the novice programmer; this is fine if you are a novice programmer, but as someone with considerable experience of C++ and other such languages, I don’t fall into that category. As a result, I find these works tend to finish at the point where I’d like them to begin! For me, the chief merit of Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP by Quentin Zervaas is that it is pitched at a higher level, and therefore addresses the sort of topics that I am more interested in.

The book looks at the development of a complete Web 2.0 application. The thing that first drew me to the book was that it used the Zend Framework, which I was in the process of learning at the time. It uses Zend Framework 1.0 in its examples, so there are plenty of modules that have been added to subsequent versions of the framework that the author might have used in his examples, but obviously couldn’t. Undoubtably the most useful thing I learnt was how to use Zend Controller plugins to perform such tasks as checking whether a user is logged in.

The book somewhat eccentrically uses Smarty for rendering its view scripts rather than the built in Zend Framework mechanism. I have not tried this out in practice, since I am happy enough with the existing facilities, especially following the introduction of modules such as Zend_Layout and Zend_Paginator. However, the examples work fine and may be of interest, either because you have a preference for using Smarty, or because you have some exisiting Smarty templates you wish to reuse within the Zend Framework.

The author includes some of his own classes that he uses to manage database access. These are built on top of the existing Zend Framework databases classes. They represent a decent approach to handling databases read/write operations in a clean fashion.

The JavaScript in the book uses the Prototype/Scriptaculous libraries. The specific usefulness of these examples will be determined by whether you use these libraries, but the general approach to using JavaScript is of wider relevance.

Overall, I found this a very helpful book. There were some things in it that were of direct use, but just as importantly, it was a stimulating look at developing a complex web application from a higher level.