Invenzzia... in English - Tag - zend framework

Invenzzia Summary #2

Zyx — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:22:00 +0200

Invenzzia Summaries are the way to inform about what's going on in Invenzzia and its open-source projects. In the second episode we will talk about incoming OPT 2.0-RC1, OPL port for Zend Framework and the incoming first bigger practical tutorial about OPT.

OPT 2.0-RC1

The source code of OPT is almost ready to publish the Release Candidate 1. The remaining issues concern the user manual and the examples that should be included now in some form. In the last few days, the source code itself was enriched with:

The unit tests for the template functions.
The final version of the caching API.
Fixes of the bugs found in the Beta3 release.

There is a small change in the previously accepted API. The Opt_Component_Interface::setDatasource() method does not require the reference now which allows to read the data from objects and any other forms of expressions. We are sorry for this oversight and the necessity of updating your component APIs.

Recently fixed bugs

The bugs fixed in the last days include:

(OPT) - bug #81 - The opt:tree instruction did not perform the error checking, which could be used to produce the invalid output code if the depth parameter was not set properly. Currently, the depth does not have to start with 0, and each raise above the initial depth is reported with an exception.
(OPT) - bug #80 - The expression parser did not capture the single occurences of the apostrophes. The output code was not affected, so this was not a critical problem, but now the parser throws an exception in this situation.
(OPT) - not reported - the defined components were generating invalid PHP code.
(OPT) - not reported - the output systems used invalid constant indicating the XML mode.
(TypeFriendly) - bug #79 - If the header section in the source document was not ended with a valid section delimiter, the script was going into the infinite loop.
(ZFPort) - not reported - the components attempted to read the CSS classes for the invalid fields from wrong template variables.
(ZFPort) - not reported - fixed the implementation of url() template function.
(ZFPort) - not reported - fixed the problem with Invenzzia_Controller_Response_Http and flushing the output buffer which caused to produce the "1" string in the output.
(ZFPort) - not reported - some of the overloaded methods had wrong prototypes which caused E_STRICT messages.

OPL port for Zend Framework

Recently, the port has been extended with the cache wrapper that allows to use the Zend_Cache component to cache the OPT views using the new OPT caching interface. Moreover, during April we have removed some annoying bugs in the code and tested the port in the real project. It works nice, but still needs some extra functionality. We are going to start the pagination support soon.

OPT tutorial

OPT provides the end users a lot of features, so nobody should be suprised that there is a need to write good practical tutorials for this library. In the last weeks, I have been working on the article entitled 'A photo gallery with Doctrine and OPT'. It shows the basic usage of Open Power Template and Doctrine library while writing a simple photo gallery script. The article will be available in two language versions: English and Polish and distributed under the Creative Commons license together with the accompanying, ready-to-run source code. Currently, the article is on the translation stage and will be published soon after the OPT 2.0-RC1 appearance.

Conclusion

We are very happy that the development stage of Open Power Template finally reaches the happy end. We know it was very long (a year and five months), but there was a lot of work to do. We are not going to stop here. Some of you may have probably noticed that the bugtacker is full of TODO tickets for the 2.1 branch which are going to bring even greater revolution in the template engine world.

Zend Framework port is available!

Zyx — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:12:00 +0100

I've recently uploaded the first revision of Open Power Libs port for Zend Framework to our SVN repositories and it is available there for public audience. The port is not completed yet, but the basic functionality is present and seems to work. I encourage everyone to test it and submit suggestions or noticed bugs. The package includes a test ZF application, and the source code is well-commented. I'll put some extra information on wiki soon, as well as set up the "real" user manual.

How to obtain?

If you have a SVN client, you can download it like any other Invenzzia project:

svn co http://svn.invenzzia.org/svn/opl4zf/trunk

Note that you must also download Zend Framework and OPL.

Zend Framework port for OPL

Zyx — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 09:04:00 +0100

One of the goals in the OPL project is not only to provide a set of great libraries, but also teach the popular PHP software, how to use them. Currently, lots of applications are designed with the help of frameworks which often provide their own solutions. It is obvious that the users do not want to deal with all the integration stuff, especially if the library is in fact a replacement for a whole part of the framework. This situation perfectly suits to Open Power Template that is rather a presentation layer framework than just a simple template engine. Currently, the programmers may already use OPT in Kohana Framework thanks to the efforts of Damian Nowak who prepared a nice port. And now, we would like the announcement of the Zend Framework port that will be released soon.

The ZF port for OPL will be released somewhere in the next week - it is developed as a standalone part of a real-world application and works as a replacement for the certain view elements in ZF and the extension of the rest in other cases. The details have already been published on our wiki: OPT Port for Zend Framework and if you are interested, feel free to read it.