January – 2011 – techPortal

DPCRadio: Working with Zend_Form January 26, 2011

Rob Allen

Zend_Form is a powerful component than can simplify form handling within your web application. Find out in this session how to make Zend_Form render and validate your form elements and ease the pain of forms on web pages.

We will look at configuration, data filters & validation and error handling. One particularly tricky area is the use of the decorator pattern to control the generated HTML when rendering the form. This session will therefore also take a detailed look at this especially powerful functionality and show how to ensure that your forms are rendered as desired.

Slides can be found here

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (93.5MB)
Doing the Heavy Lifting: Gearman and Magento January 17, 2011

With most web applications, there comes a time where there is a need to perform either CPU or I/O intensive work based on user actions. Whether processing uploaded files, or performing system-wide database updates, developers are increasingly turning to Gearman as a simple way to hand off the heavy lifting to another server to be performed asynchronously. It is easy to install and configure and has interfaces to many popular languages, including PHP.
With this in mind, the team at Ibuildings created a module to allow easy usage of Gearman from within the open source ecommerce solution Magento. Releasing this module provides a simple way to perform job queue operations within the popular open-source ecommerce platform. The module is open source and freely available for download at https://github.com/ibuildings/Magento-Gearman-Module/tree/Version_1_0_0. This tutorial walks through installation of the module and some examples using it; it is assumed that you are already familiar with Magento development to begin this tutorial.
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Database Version Control January 11, 2011

Version control for source code is used by most development teams today. It gives you a history of all the changes you made, you can use it to share your code with others and you can work on an experimental feature without polluting the stable product. These are just some of the reasons why version control software is considered indispensable today. But where does our database fit in all this? How can we share the changes we want to make to the database with our colleagues, and eventually with our production environment?

Database version control is something that most developers have to deal with regularly, yet only a few have actually thought about what solution might be best for them. Most people have a solution that sort of works for them, but when you ask them about the subject they are pretty convinced that there must be some better way to manage database changes, they're just not entirely sure what that solution is – but the silver bullet must be out there somewhere, right?

This article will give you a bit more insight into the theory behind database version control, and gives you several suggestions on how you could deal with the problem. We will look at simple solutions and also take a look at some of the tools available to help.
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Video Interview: Kevlin Henney January 6, 2011

To kick off 2011 here's an interview with our inspirational keynote speaker Kevlin Henney - talking about development and how we can keep bettering ourselves!

Video Interview: Kevlin Henney from Ibuildings on Vimeo.

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