In the words of Ralph Johnson:

Designing software is hard. That is what makes it so fun! People who are good at designing software enjoy solving hard problems, at bringing order to chaos, at overcoming difficulties. Things that used to be hard are now easy, but we have moved on to working on problems that would have been impossible 20 years ago. OO programming helps but does not eliminate the difficulty of design.

I always assumed that Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language was some source of inspiration for these gentlemen and I was surprised to find out that it wasn't in fact the case.

You can setup your own code templates in the PHP options in NetBeans:

Here's the code template I use for generating unit test cases:

/**
 * Test class for ${classname}
 * @author: jlebensold
 */
 
class ${classname}
    extends ControllerTestCase
{
    protected $$${obj};
 
    public function setUp()
    {
	parent::setUp();
	$this->${obj} = new ${class_to_test}();
    }
 
    public function tearDown()
    {
	$this->${obj} = null;
    }
}

I even managed to get the unit testing environment to work with my Zend Framework installation with a little bash scripting. I realized that the PHPUnit test runner built into netbeans requires certain command line arguments, but because its designed to do single class tests instead of using the phpunit.xml file, I had to override it.

Here's my batchtest.sh file:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
cd ~/Sites/myproject/tests
phpunit --configuration phpunit.xml $1 $2
#phpunit $1 $2 $3

with this file, I can set either to have phpunit behave like it normally would in NetBeans (line 4), or have it read my phpunit.xml file instead.

The result is a nice little test runner that's built into my development environment:

I'm still trying to integrate code coverage, but since I get HTML reports, I think I can handle switching to my web browser for that.

The author, Peter Svennson, is probably one of the most qualified people in the world to be writing a book about Dojo, considering he's a contributor. The book takes plenty of time covering some of the more common Dijits and how best to apply them in an application. Like any framework, knowledge of certain core components helps when extending that knowledge across the rest of the library.

As someone who's worked extensively with JQuery and Prototype, I appreciated the authors recognition of other frameworks, while being able to diplomatically keep the discussion focused on Dojo without diminishing the work done on the other site of the Javascript framework fence.

Before being totally entrenched in the various Dojo libraries, Svennson takes a couple pages to explain closures and Javascript's prototype based object model. I found his explanation enlightening and a good starting point for a conversation on Dojo. Svennson also sold me on Dojo's class building framework.

What kept me flipping through the pages was Svennson's passion for the technology. The writing style is informal and conveys his personal interest in Dojo's architecture. However sometimes I felt this same passionate writing starts to read more like a sales pitch and less like a serious technical reference.

If you're the type of person that likes to work through a practical application of the technology, Learning Dojo is probably not the best book for the job. Instead of figuring out how to build a form with client-side validation that showcases all the Dojo bells and whistles (which I don't think one app could truly do), you're invited to create custom events, learn how to build class structures with pseudo-inheritance, look at localization and ways of theming your application. Since a lot of these features are design-releated, they tend to feel disjoint.

Only in the last chapter are we introduced to "real-world Dojo". While the examples are great, they feel almost tacked on. Regardless, the multi-charting project and the CRUD application cover a lot of components that were already discussed previously. It's also nice to see that Svennson mentions how to unit test using DOH. Learning Dojo is by no means a book for beginners: as the book progresses, there are large chunks of markup that are loosely explained in passing.

If you're already married to Dojo, planning a site in Dojo or inheriting something written in Dojo, this book could be a great reference for getting familiar with the technology quickly. If this sounds like you, grab a copy from Amazon.

UPDATE: enjoy reading Chapter 6 for free online!

Having said that, I'd love to encourage other developers who are doing video tutorials on Zend to feel capable of contributing to zendcasts.

ln -s /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock /tmp/mysql.sock

This is all probably because I (like most developers) have a broken system. I'm also running on a mac which means that disabled versions of PHP and MySQL are lurking around from the Leopard installation. I'd still like to see the folks at Zend start encouraging the Rails practice of symlinking the htdocs folder. The htdocs folder isn't well structured in the mac installation to accomodate an application folder sitting underneath it (e.g. /Applications/ZendServer/apache2/myapp/htdocs instead of /Applications/ZendServer/apache2/htdocs).

I also had to create a symlink in the public folder of my Zend Framework application to Zend server:

ln -s /Applications/ZendServer/gui/UserServer ZendServer

And because I user mod_rewrite, I had to setup a special exclusion in my existing .htaccess file in order to make sure that Zend_Server didn't get angry:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/ZendServer
RewriteRule !\.(js|ico|gif|jpg|png|css|pdf|mov|mp3|swf)$ index.php

The payoff? Integrated debugging and speed! I'll probably put together a video tutorial of sorts. The only bummer is that Zend Server doesn't have integrated vhost support. I'm also looking forward to running some Java classes through Java bridge (Hibernate perhaps?)

All that aside, I've been working on a new website with screencasts about the Zend Framework. I'll be posting videos every week. If you have any suggestions about topics you'd like me to cover, send me an email!

I'm planning to do some videos about Blueprint and Zend, using Zend Controllers (and making custom routes), basic work with view helpers.

All the videos on Zendcasts will be iPhone friendly for those long subway rides when you're just burning to watch another nerd code. Go to Zendcasts!