David Stockton presented on Firebug and FirePHP and their integration with Zend_Log:

On December 17, Dan Lindorf gave a presentation on the basics of the Model, View, Controller (MVC) construct. The MVC pattern is used to create functional separation of application objects through easily defined boundaries. MVC abstraction has proven to be highly effective in creating scalable, high performance web applications and has been adopted as a best practice within the FRPUG. 

I've posted my presentation slides from last night's FRPUG meeting. I will try to post the screencast later on if you'd like to hear the presentation as well.

Update: I've posted the screencast online now too. It's 1 hour 2 minutes long but you will be able to heard the discussion and questions that took place during the presentation.

Thanks,
David

On December 17, Dan Lindorf presented a basic introduction to the Zend Framework. This presentation included an overview of the Zend Framework directory structure, the Zend MVC implementation, class autoloading, the Zend Bootstrap, and many of the cool features built into the Zend Framework library. Due to limited time, Dan was only able to complete half of the presentation. The rest of the presentation will be provded during the January 28 FRPUG meeting.

Please try the attached code sample for yourself. If you have questions or comments, please leave them at forums section at this site under presentations.

simple-zend-part-2.zip - file containing source code for the sample

Please try the attached code sample for yourself.  If you have questions or comments, please leave them at forums section at this site under presentations.

simplezend.zip - file containing source code for the sample

Improve performance with APC.  This presentation shows how APC improves the performance of a stock Joomla website... known to be very resource heavy.

Assuming the weather cooperates and we don't have to cancel tomorrow's meeting, presentations will be on Zend Debugger, Unit testing and test driven development, and, if we have time, a little more on Zend_Form, specifically how to use Zend_Form for just validation and filtering with standard HTML forms.

We've got a lot of great prizes to give away and some awesome announcements, so I hope we'll see you there tomorrow night.

David

Last night, FRPUG held its first monthly meeting in Denver, and it was a huge success. We had 15 attendees who enjoyed pizza and sodas provided by TEK Systems. Our Vice President, Chad Robertson, presented on debugging PHP using Zend Studio and Zend Debugger. Unfortunately we forgot to screen capture it but Chad may be posting the slides later. If that happens, the link will be here later.

After that, I presented on Unit testing with PHPUnit using a Test Driven Development methodology. That presentation was screen captured and should be posted once I am able to find a place to upload an hour long screencast.

At the end of the presentations, we gave away door prizes which included several Zend T-shirts, a copy of TechSmith's Camtasia Studio, a copy of TechSmith's SnagIt!, and a variety of other cool prizes.

Our next meeting will be in Colorado Springs on January 27. Matt will be presenting on APC (Alternative PHP Cache). Other presentations will be announced as they are determined.

Looking forward to seeing you at the next meeting!

Thanks,
David

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. I'll be working on that.

In November we had two presentations: Chad presented on Zend_Form and went into how to use filters, validators and decorators. Unfortunately, we forgot to record the presentation so there's not a lot to post on that.

Also, Mike presented on how to set up multi-site Drupal on the Mac. His presentation material is available on his blog.

He also mentioned that if you want to use launchd (Mac native scheduled jobs) instead of cron, he's got that as well.

Thanks to both of these guys for their presentations. I'm looking forward to the December 23rd meeting and I hope we'll see a lot of you there at the Rockrimmon Library. I've got a lot of exciting news to share and we'll have some excellent door prizes to give away.

Thanks, David

As promised, I've finished the editing of the screen cast and uploaded it to the intarwebs. You can view it here: PHPUnit and Test Driven Development. I step you through creating a functional Zend_Form without having to set up the whole Zend MVC framework.

The form is presented as a standard HTML form that submits to a PHP page for processing. That page simply determines if the form is "valid" or not by calling Zend_Form's isValid() method. The form has three fields: name, email and phone. Using Test Driven Development, I show you how to write unit tests first and then write a little bit of code to make them pass until at the end we've got a fully functional Zend_Form object with validators (Zend_Validate) and filters (Zend_Filter), including development of a custom filter class for formatting the phone number and another filter for allowing alphabetic phone number entry.

Please take a look and send any comments or questions to dave@frontrangephp.org.

I hope you enjoy the screencast, and I hope to see you at our next meeting.

Thanks,
David