Zend on PHP Boy Scout

Installing PECL extensions for Zend Server 6

Mon, 13 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Recently we have revisited using Zend Server for some of our projects and decided to give the new version 6 a chance to prove itself.

Overall its a big improvement over version 5. There are still some things that are extremely annoying but we have decided that we can overlook them.

However there is one thing that we couldn’t do without. By default you will find that a number of PECL extensions will not install out of the box (at least this is what we experience using the Debian based install).

To fix this you will need to make sure you install the additional packages in ubuntu

php-5.4-source-zend-server or php-5.3-source-zend-server depending on the php version you are using
autoconf
build-essential

Once this is done you should now be able to install extensions from PECL without too much hassle.

Docblock, Oh Docblock, wherefore art thou Docblock (hint: Zend Optimizer Plus lost them)

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

tl;dr> I make a terrible assumption about Zend Optimizer+ and am corrected by Dominic in the comments;

Terrible post title I know but its the best I could come up with.

I’ve just come up for air after spending the majority of the day debugging some issues on our current development sandbox.

Now our sandbox tends to be quite bleeding edge in some circumstances and as such we run a fair few bits of unstable code. On the sandbox in question we have been running PHP 5.4.11 and unfortunately we have struggled to get APC working with it just the way we need it to. The lack of APC tends to make this sandbox quite slow.

We recently saw that Zend have open-sourced their OptimizerPlus extension (https://github.com/zend-dev/ZendOptimizerPlus) and that it was compatible with 5.4…. Fantastic, or so we thought.

So I added the new OptimiserPlus to the sandbox and everything was going swimmingly. That was until we had to run one of the utility scripts that we use to rebuild some of our data structures. These scripts make use of different parts of both Zend Framework and Doctrine which tend to rely on some heavy DocBlock annotations.

Now having used both APC and Zend Server knowing that they done affect this kind of functionality I had expected that OptimizerPlus would be fine…. Wrongo. It took me a good few hours of head scratching trying to figure out what had happened.

It turns out that OptimizerPlus suffers from the same flaws that eAccellerator does and strips Docblocks when caching the bytecode. This results in Reflection returning false when you call methods such as `getDocComment()`.

All in all its not the end of the world I just disable OptimizerPlus and have to wait till I can get APC working. Not my ideal scenario but I can live with it.

Something that does concern me is that there is currently an RFC that has gone to vote (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/optimizerplus) about integrating OptimizerPlus into the PHP 5.5 distribution. While this is great I do worry how many other things may break and will they be picked up and fixed for the 5.5 release.

Update: Since writing this post the RFC has finished being voted upon and has been approved. You can expect to see Optimizer Plus appearing bundled with PHP soon.

Update (15th Mar 13): Thanks to Dominics’ comment I now know that you can tell Optimizer+ to retain your Docblocks by setting your config using

zend_optimizerplus.save_comments (default "1")
	If disabled, all PHPDoc comments are dropped from the code to reduce the
	size of the optimized code. Disabling "Doc Comments" may break some
	existing applications and frameworks (e.g. Doctrine, ZF2, PHPUnit)

zend_optimizerplus.load_comments (default "1")
	If disabled, PHPDoc comments are not loaded from SHM, so "Doc Comments"
	may be always stored (save_comments=1), but not loaded by applications
	that don't need them anyway.

That’ll teach me to write a blog post without investigating more first.

Bootstrapping ZF2 Forms

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So…

With the release of beta 5 for Zend Framework 2 I thought it time for me to tidy up and fix a few modules I created back at beta 3.

Now I’m a big fan of Twitter Bootstrap CSS framework as I’m sure a lot of other people are as well. Seeing that the Zend Skeleton Application comes with bootstrap already included it was easy enough to set up my forms using the old ZF Forms found in ZF1.

However a brand spanking new Forms component has been rolled out with ZF2. The long and the short of this new component meant that I had the opportunity to hand roll a new way of making my forms work with Twitter Bootstrap.

So, a little tinkering, a quick pull request to ZF2 to allow the definition of arbitrary options and I came up with some useful View Helpers that can be dropped into a project and used.

You can find them at https://github.com/zucchi/Zucchi.

So how to use them. Lets start by creating a new form (we’ll keep it simple for now)

class MyForm extends Form
{
 public function __construct()
 {
 parent::__construct('myform');
 $this->add(array(
 'name' => 'price',
 'attributes' => array(
 'type' => 'text',
 'required' => 'required',
 'placeholder' => '0.99',
 ),
 'options' => array(
 'label'
 'bootstrap' => array(
 'help' => array(
 'style' => 'block'
 'content' => 'The price you wish to use'
 ),
 'prepend' => array('$'),
 'append' => array('¢'),
 ),
 ),
 );

 $actions = new Collection('actions');
 $actions->setAttribute('class', 'form-actions');

 $actions->add(array(
 'name' => 'submit',
 'attributes' => array(
 'type' => 'submit',
 'value' => 'Save',
 'class' => 'btn btn-primary'
 ),
 'options' => array(
 'bootstrap' => array(
 'style' => 'inline',
 ),
 ),
 ));

 $actions->add(array(
 'name' => 'reset',
 'attributes' => array(
 'type' => 'reset',
 'value' => 'reset',
 'class' => 'btn'
 ),
 'options' => array(
 'bootstrap' => array(
 'style' => 'inline',
 ),
 ),
 ));
 $this->add($actions);
 }
}

You’ll notice that I have highlighted some lines. Thanks to the ability to set arbitrary options we can define a “bootstrap” option which we can then use to allow us to pass data into our new bootstrap view helpers. You can also see that I have added a save and reset button to a collection. I’ll explain that later.

So what next… Rather than go into the mechanics of how to work with forms I’ll refer you to the ZF documentation and this excellent blog post

We then pick up by looking at your view, and the helpers I have created.

BootstrapForm($form, $formStyle)

One of the few things I miss from the ZF1 implementation of Forms is the self rendering aspect! So what did I decide to do? That’s right I created a view helper to render everything in one command.

The $this->bootstrapForm() takes two parameters. The first is quite obviously the form. The second is the style of form. This is directly related to the form types that can be found http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/base-css.html#forms. You can use any of ‘vertical’, ‘inline’, ‘search’ & ‘horizontal’. If you dont specify a formStyle then it will default to ‘vertical’

Caveat: This helper will then iterate through all of the associated elements and render them first. Only after the direct elements have been generated will it then move onto Collections or Fieldsets (as soon as I work out how I’ll fix this).

BootstrapRow($element, $formStyle)

This is a straightforward modification of the FormRow helper that come bundled with the new component.

We have a few differences now though. We have a second parameter as with the BootstrapForm view helper and the output is generated using sprintf and a set of templates that mimic the structures of the different form styles from bootstrap.

This helper can be used by itself to generate an element row and is used by the BootstrapForm helper

We can also now take advantage of the “bootstrap” options we set earlier.

Bootstrap Options

style

The style of form element to use regardless of what style may be passed into the view helper (you can see an example of this in the buttons from the MyForm example above)

help

This works in the same way as “description” did from ZF1 but allows you to define it either as a string or an array with the keys “style” for either ‘inline’ or ‘block’ and “Content” which should be self explainatory

prepend

Takes advantage of Bootstraps ability to prepend blocks to an input field. This can be defined as a single string, or an array of strings to allow you to add multiple blocks should you want to

prepend

Takes advantage of Bootstraps ability to append blocks to an input field. This can be defined as a single string, or an array of strings to allow you to add multiple blocks should you want to

These options get evaluated and spat out from the new renderBootstrapOptions() method as part of the “render”.

BootstrapCollection($element, $style, $wrap)

Again this is a direct rip off of the FormCollection helper found in the ZF2 Form component witha few modifications. The main difference is that is makes use of the BootstrapRow helper and has methods and properties to allow the setting of the form style to use.

You can see from the MyForm example above that we set a Collection called ‘actions’. This is a pretty standard way of grouping elements together. You can also see that we set a class for the Collection which may look familiar to those that have used Twitter Bootstrap for a while.

What our helper will then do is wrap the buttons in a div with the appropriate class attached. If you were to define a label for the Collection/Fieldset You would then also find that the fieldset and legend tags are also spat out with our <div class="form-actions"> sandwiched between them and the elements.

Result

So what we now get when we use MyForm with out helpers.

$this->bootstrapForm($form, 'horizontal');

Should now look something like this

How you can use it

As of right now you can get the library from its repo on github @ https://github.com/zucchi/Zucchi and can be found on packagist for use with composer

Edit: The bootstrap stuff has moved to a new location as a separate ZF2 module. you can find it @ https://github.com/zucchi/ZucchiBootstrap or @ packagist for use with composer