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Content Tagged with front + PHP

Alvaro Videla just wrote in to tell us about Firesymfony, a Firebug extension that provides an alternative to Symfony's built-in web debug toolbar.

sometimes the toolbar position makes impossible to use some features of the layout of our website, like a link menu on the top right corner. It also happens that while we display a small popup with the resize functionality disabled it’s turns hard to access all the data displayed by the toolbar.

The solution I’ve came up with is to move all the data from the toolbar to Firebug, actually, to port the symfony web debug toolbar as a Firebug extension. This will remove the toolbar from the page html and will show it in a convenient place that almost every web developer is used to.

Taking advantage from the cool new features of symfony 1.2 I started a project to develop a symfony plugin to send the data to the Firebug extension. The later has been smartly called FireSymfony.

Alvaro has another blog post that talks more about the first release.

The Zend Framework aims to be a top notch framework for building next generation Web applications in PHP. Dojo has similar aims on the front-end side, so they decided to join forces to provide an integration layer. If you like the combination you will have a better, tighter, way to build your applications.

What we see in the initial release is:

• JSON-RPC Server: We are re-working the Zend_Json_Server that has
  been in our incubator since, oh, what? 0.2.0? and never released to
  actually follow a specification:
  JSON-RPC. This
  will allow it to work seamlessly with Dojo, as well as other toolkits
  that have JSON-RPC client implementations. I have actually completed
  work on this, though the proposal is waiting to be approved; if you want
  to check it out, you can find it in the
  ZF svn.

  The original Zend_Json_Server implementation will be abandoned. It was
  never fully tested nor fully documented, which has prevented its
  release. Additionally, since it implemented its own ad-hoc standard, it
  did not provide the type of interoperability that a true JSON-RPC server
  implementation will provide. I am excited that we will finally be able
  to provide a standards-compliant solution for general availability.

  One final note: there are currently two different JSON-RPC
  specifications, 1.0 and 2.0. My goal is to support each, though for the
  time being, only version 1.0 will be supported, as that is the version
  Dojo currently targets.

• dojo() View Helper: Enabling Dojo for a page is not typically as
  trivial as just loading the dojo.js script -- you have a
  choice of loading it from the AOL CDN or a local path, and also may want
  or need to load additional dojo, dijit, or dojox modules, specify custom
  modules and paths, specify code to run at onLoad(), and
  specify stylesheets for decorating dijits. On top of this, this
  information may change from page to page, and may only be needed for
  a subset of pages. The dojo() view helper will act as a
  placeholder
  implementation, and facilitate all of the above tasks, as well as take
  care of rendering the necessary style and
  script elements in your page.
• Form Element implementations: One area that developers really
  leverage javascript and ajax toolkits is forms. In particular, many
  types of form input can benefit from advanced and rich user interfaces
  that only javascript can provide: calendar choosers, time selectors,
  etc. Additionally, many like to use client-side validation in order to
  provide instantaneous validation feedback to users (instead of requiring
  a round-trip to the server). We will be identifying a small group of
  form elements that we feel solve the most relevant use cases, and write
  Dojo-specific versions that can be utilized with Zend_Form.
  (One thing to note: Zend_Form's design already works very
  well with Dojo, allowing many widgets and client-side validations to be
  created by simply setting the appropriate element attributes.)
• dojo.data Compatibility: dojo.data defines a
  standard storage interface; services providing data in this format can
  then be consumed by a variety of Dojo facilities to provide highly
  flexible and dynamic content for your user interfaces. We will be
  building a component that will create dojo.data compatible payloads with
  which to respond to XmlHttpRequests; you will simply need to pass in the
  data, and provide metadata regarding it.

Of course, you can continue to any Ajax library in conjunction with the Zend Framework, and ditto for Dojo.... but why did this match happen?

There are many synergies and similarities between the two projects and their communities, including:

• Licensing and IP: Both projects are very business friendly.
• Design affinity: Similar philosophies, including a strong emphasis on use-at-will architecture.
• JSON format used strongly in both
• Comprehensive Ajax Solution: Dojo has it all
• Standards: "Dojo not only implements published standards, but also drives them"
• Communities and support: Strong communities, with support offerings behind them

And, here is some code from a JSON-RPC demo:

My favourite kind of tutorial or trick are the ones that are very easy to do but make a lot of sense - you know the ones that make you slap your forehead and say "why didn't I do that before?".

Dirk Ginader blogged about a commenting trick (in German) that is one of these. He rightly claims that when you develop, you will comment and uncomment a lot as you optimise and test your code. This means either inserting lines with comment and deleting those lines, adding and deleting the /* */ by hand or using a shortcut of your editor of choice (I loved Homesite for ctrl+shift+m). In any case, it means highlighting several lines to comment in or out.

If you however use the following syntax then you only need to delete one slash to comment and uncomment a section:

The trick is the // before the closing */. With this you can just add another slash before the opening one and uncomment the block this way.

This works in many languages, alas not in CSS as there is no single line comment.

Update: in CSS you can just delete and add and remove an asterisk:

John Le Drew has been working on a PHP framework for a few years, and has now packaged it as Simplicity:

The Simplicity PHP Application Framework is an advanced, scalable and extensible PHP application framework to aid developers in creating high traffic, high availability Web 2.0 online applications. Integrating a solid MVC framework with some of the best Open Source projects around Simplicity aims to assist developers with any amount of experience in taking their applications to a new level.

You can get to the code on the launchpad for the framework.

One important piece is the Ajax admin console, developed in Ext that allows a developer will be able to configure all aspects of their application via the Ajax interface, this includes database modeling and the creation of stub controllers, and even the addition of predefined actions to speed up development.

I haven't seen many languages implemented in PHP. J4P5 "is a JavaScript interpreter written in PHP 5, that allows to run untrusted scripts in a sandbox on your server. It aims to implement most of Ecma-262 3d edition."

J4P5 uses a modified version of the CFG parser of the MetaPHP project, and is licensed under the GPL

This project is new. The current version already exposes most of the features commonly associated with JavaScript, such as objects, prototypes, closures.

Notable caveats of this version (aka "the TODO list"):

• No support for unicode strings
• No support for regular expressions
• Semi-colons at the end of statements are not optional
• Most of the pre-defined objects/methods have not been tested
• The speed is definitely slower than PHP. It's getting better though.

plainTemplate is a new library that aims to separate out an HTML template from design and coding, thanks to selectors.

The designer works by simply using HTML in any way they wish, and then the programmer:

• Write selectors based on HTML structure
• Pass those selectors and Controller data to plainTemplate
• plainTemplate parses template, removing designer's example data
• If there is a need, you can manually write template proccessing rules with phpQuery - a jQuery port to PHP
• Everything caches to pure, human-readable PHP file, similar to that one written with no template engine
• From one HTML file You can build several templates
• Once the Designer updates the file, the cached template updates itself transparently

phpQuery is a port of jQuery that let's you do things like this:

Download plainTemplate

The Sun Web Developer Pack isn't a sexy name, and having 'Sun' start it out often doesn't help a technology.... but there is some good technology here.

The Sun Web Developer Pack helps you to leverage emerging web technologies and techniques to create interactive and dynamic web applications for the enterprise. This toolkit is a collection of technologies for Ajax, Scripting and REST-based services development supported by a NetBeans plugin that simplifies the design and development of Rich Internet Applications.

If you look past the marketing-speak you see that Sun has packaged technology such as Project jMaki and Project Phobos.

jMaki is a lightweight, client/server framework for creating JavaScript-centric Web 2.0 applications. You can use jMaki when developing with PHP, Portlets, Facelets, Java, and JavaScript.

Do you see that? Since when did Sun create something that lets you develop with PHP :)

Phobos is a lightweight, scripting-friendly web application environment that runs on the Java platform.

Phobos allows you to write with JavaScript on the server side, which can be very powerful indeed.

There are a vast number of demos available including interesting mashups.

François Zaninotto has been talking about a new Unobtrusive JavaScript Plug-In for symfony.

Simple Example

How it is generated

this becomes...

Steve Marx has created a PHP library for the Microsoft Ajax 1.0 release that uses the JavaScript piece in PHP land.

The Microsoft AJAX Library is a pure-JavaScript library that's used by ASP.NET AJAX but is also available as a separate download. Because it's pure JavaScript, it's not tied to ASP.NET on the backend. PHP for MS AJAX is code to help you make use of the Microsoft AJAX Library from PHP applications. With this first Alpha release, it simply supports exposing PHP classes as AJAX-enabled web services, just as in ASP.NET applications. In fact, the generated proxies are identical to what you get from ASP.NET, meaning you can have full interoperability.

Hello World

The service on the backend so to speak:

And the front end that will talk to it: