• Move the packed tar.gz to the server
• Unpack the tar.gz
• Copy the contents to the web root
• Chmod files xyz to 777
• …

Oh the madness. Seeing this it should of course be immediately clear that doing this by hand is extremely error prone and slow and plain stupid. Time to automate!

What can my build-file do for me?

There are plenty of flavours to choose from. After some evaluation I settled on phing since the project I’m currently using this for is PHP based, the build files are easy to read (based on Apache Ant) and it’s extensible. phing comes shipped with plenty of tasks for you to choose from and if there’s ever anything missing you want to get done quick and dirty you can run an Exec Task and have PHP run something on the console for you – neat!

Closure

Phing also comes with a JSMin task but this being 2010 I wanted to use Closure compiler because it’s a much sweeter deal and because I wanted to write this blog post. The files produced are smaller and you can do all kinds of cool things like merging files into one (fewer requests!) or removing dead code. It’s pretty cool. I put the whole thing up on Github so feel free to download it from there and fork me. I’ve included a sample task as well so that should get you up and running pretty quickly.  And did I mention Github?

find . -name '*.php' -not -path '*/Loader/Autoloader.php' \
  -not -path '*/Application.php' -print0 | \
  xargs -0 gsed --regexp-extended --in-place 's/(require_once)/\/\/ \1/g'

Update: As part of my new job we’re currently working on a merchandise management system which is hosted somewhere in the Amazon S3 Cloud. The performance impact of removing all the require_once calls was very dramatic on that system. So looks like this hint can come in handy after all in certain situations. What I now did is add the snippet to the phing deployment task that takes care of updating Zend Framework. Since it’s hardly any effort at all there really isn’t any reason not to do this.

$element->clearDecorators();

and then either adds the default ViewHelper or whatever gets passed to the method and that was the root of the problem. When clearing the decorators, Zend_Form_Element_File now explicitly requires you to add the File Decorator again before rendering. After discovering that, it turned out being a quick fix…

Zend_Loader::registerAutoload( '...' );

However, upgrading everything to the new Zend_Loader_Autoloader_Interface actually worked quite a lot easier than expected:

class Webwerk_Autoloader implements Zend_Loader_Autoloader_Interface
{
  /**
   * Autoloader
   */
  public function autoload ( $class )
  {
    // Custom autoloading of different classes
    // Each one has a return value
 
    // Fallback
    try {
      Zend_Loader::loadClass( $class );
      return $class;
    } catch ( Exception $e ) {
      return false; // Nothing there
    }
 
  }
}

And in the bootstrapper we have:

$autoloader = Zend_Loader_Autoloader::getInstance();
$autoloader->setFallbackAutoloader( true );
$autoloader->pushAutoloader( new Webwerk_Autoloader( ) );

So the only change was making Webwerk_Autoloader match the Zend_Loader_Autoloader_Interface as well as changing the bootstrap to use the default autoloader as fallback and registering the custom autoloader.

I quite enjoy the Python syntax and some of the string manipulation functions are super awesome compared to what PHP has to offer. I had a look at the different web frameworks available, Pylons was the one that appealed to me the most and having spent some time with it today I must say that it doesn’t disappoint. They also have a very cool ebook available called The Pylons Book. I’ll keep you posted on how the adventure continues.

$ zf create project theNewProject

This will create the initial project layout with directories, controllers and all. Brilliant.

The new Zend_Application has been added to handle the task of bootstrapping your application and other cool stuff, one of the most important features is the new way that modules are treated in Zend_Application which should help keep your application DRYer than ever.