James Titcumb

UPDATE!!

For the new Zend Framework 1.8.x series, please refer to this article. This is still here for historical purposes.

This is a pretty simple howto, but here it is anyway!

I assume already that you’ve got a LAMP stack working, and if you don’t, it’s easy as pie to install one in Ubuntu:

sudo tasksel install lamp-server

So now you’ve got your LAMP stack up and running, lets download the latest SVN tag of Zend Framework. At the time of writing, the latest stable is 1.7.8, which I’ll use here. If you want to check for the latest version, visit http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/standard/tags/ in your browser, and the last folder is the one you want. If you want stable full releases, ignore the RC/PR versions. So, once you’ve determined the version you want, we’ll check out the release:

cd /usr/share/php5
sudo mkdir ZendFramework
sudo svn co http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/standard/tags/release-1.7.8/

It is likely you’ll need to use sudo for these commands as /usr/share/php5 is owned by root by default. You’ll see a big long list of files being checked out, and once that’s done you’ll have a new folder appropriately named “release-1.7.8″. Create a soft link called “current” to the release folder so you can change the default included Zend Framework version without restarting Apache in the future:

sudo ln -s release-1.7.8 current

You can stop there if you like, and manually add the include path into your PHP scripts using set_include_path. However, if you would like the current Zend Framework included automatically, then continue by opening /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini in your favourite editor. Add the path to your include_path list. For example, if your current include_path is (and this is the default):

include_path = ".:/usr/share/php5:/usr/share/pear"

Then change it to:

include_path = ".:/usr/share/php5:/usr/share/pear:/usr/share/php5/ZendFramework/current/library"

All you need to do now is restart Apache:

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

In the future, if you wish to change to a new default Zend Framework version (for example 1.8.0), then just check out the SVN directory and change the soft link. You won’t even have to restart Apache, and the changes will take effect immediately! For example:

sudo svn co http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/standard/tags/release-1.8.0/
sudo rm current
sudo ln -s release-1.8.0 current

If you want to keep up to date with the latest Zend software, then just subscribe to their RSS feed!

OK, so far all that I’ve managed to do is install it and have a dabble with the config pages and go “oooh that looks pretty”, so this isn’t a hardcore review or anything.

Zend have unveiled their newest product, Zend Server… which is essentially Zend’s own W/M/LAMP stack, but with Zend Framework and other components Zend have written, including the very handy Zend Debugger. What does that mean? Well to me, that means there’s quite an easy choice for my web development at home – I just installed it in 10 minutes and now have a fully working WAMP stack I can develop on before pushing to my Linode test server. It was 100 times easier than any other WAMP stack I’ve worked with including XAMPP and the other ones I’ve tried. It has a very shiny web GUI as well (pictured), that – as I mentioned before – I went “oooh” at lots. I personally think Zend Server has the potential to be really frickin’ awesome if I get to know it better. From the Public Beta Invitation e-mail, Zend states it includes:

• Fully supported and certified distribution of PHP 5.2
• Fully supported Zend Framework 1.7 release
• Integrated native installers (RPM/DEB/MSI)
• Web-based administration Interface
• Comprehensive out-of-the-box database connectivity
• Powerful PHP monitoring capabilities to identify problems and help fix them quickly
• URL-based output caching required by today’s modern web applications
• Zend Optimizer+ – byte code cache to boost application performance
• New “Guard Loader” to enable processing of Zend Guard encoded files

Not bad – and there’s a community edition too, which means if you’re a sole developer like me it’s affordable.

<rant>Unfortunately, they don’t do a community edition of Zend Studio for Eclipse… and although PDT is good, I feel like its the hacky “well Zend Studio uses PDT at it’s core” alternative – without the cool enhancements that ZS has… oh well!</rant>

An old article appeared in my phpdeveloper.org inbox today, about Microsoft and Zend uniting to improve Windows running PHP support. A chap called Tony Bibbs raised a question back then which I think could still be unanswerable, seeing as Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo! still hasn’t been accepted.

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Oh – I forgot to mention also that I got around to upgrading to WP 2.5. Not had much of a fiddle, so far all I can see is that the admin section had a bit of a facelift, but I’m off to bed in just a second as Hannah is waiting for me, so I shall investigate another time!

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So back in England and working again. Here’s a couple of tech-related links I read about today:

• Microsoft to add ‘super standards’ mode to IE8
• Coding Styles: bools, structs, or enums?

Interesting? Well this is the first IE8-related article I’ve read, so I don’t really know what to make of it yet. I still am vehemently in love with Firefox, so it would take a miracle for IE8 to wow me. As for the bit on C#, just generally a nice little bit of code. I’ve not read through the comments, but I like the idea of C# object initialisers.

I still prefer LAMP though… I love LAMP.