Zend Framework: Application resources

In this second part of my Zend Framework quest, i will dive in the wonderfull world of application resource plugins. Zend_Application provide several standard resource plugins for database access, session management, routing etc. You can find more info about these standard Resource Plugins here.

The fun part of these Resource Plugins is that they can be configurated completely within the application.ini (or application.xml) configuration file and are loaded automatically by the Application Bootstrapper.  For example you can define a new Route resource “myroute” referencing the module/controller/action without writing any code like this:

; Router resources
resources.router.routes.myroute.route = "hello/:myname"
resources.router.routes.myroute.defaults.module = "mymodule"
resources.router.routes.myroute.defaults.controller = "index"
resources.router.routes.myroute.defaults.action = "index"

Which will route the following url “http://localhost/hello/world” to the standard controller action from the “mymodule” module, with the request parameter “myname”  filled with “world”.

While Zend Framework ships with a number of standard resource plugins, the intention is that developers should write their own to encapsulate their own initialization needs. So lets begin with our own custom resource plugin for initializing application logging using Zend_Log.

Zend Framework: Project setup

It has been a while since i last wrote a post about working with the Zend Framework and the, then rather new, package Zend_Amf. The project structure was an attempt to integrate the Zend MVC with Zend Amf (and of course try out some new features in the Flash player 10).
Since that post, Zend has released some major releases with some rather big changes, like the Zend_Application package combined with the Bootstrap class.

Because i am not a real PHP programmer (consider myself as a junior in that area), it is rather difficult to learn all the ins-and-outs of the framework and i rely heavily on what other people write on the internet about the several topics considering the Zend Framework.

So i decided to bundle all my findings into one project setup and publish the sources on Google code. This way i always have access to these sources and i can refer to them within coming blog posts.

Fileupload using Zend AMF, RemoteObject and Flash 10

In one of my earlier posts i described a method for uploading files using the RemoteObject class found in the Flex SDK. For the “back end” i used the still very popular amfphp implementation of the AMF protocol.

Wade Arnold the maintainer of amfphp is also involved in another implementation of the AMF protocol which is shipped with the Zend Framework. After reading some blog posts about this “new” package called Zend_Amf, i decided to give it a try.

Download ZendAMFUpload.zip for full example code.

Fileupload using AMFPHP, RemoteObject and Flash 10

File upload with Adobe Flex is a common asked feature for lots of applications. There are several posts on the internet to be found which explain, in detail, how to do this.

Most of these examples however uses the http protocol to transport the binary data. With the arrival of the Adobe Flash 10 player and the new FileReference features that comes with it, it is now also possible to upload a file via a RemoteObject service call.

RemoteObject using AMFPHP and Actionscript 3

In my daytime job i am currently involved with a Flex3/BlazeDS project.The question arises to me quickly if it was possible to use Actionscript 3 RemoteObject classes with a PHP back end. A quick search with Google showed me some examples where Flex mxml in combination with amfphp 1.9 was used. This particular version of amfphp has support for AMF3 messaging protocol and therefore can be used natively with AS3 RemoteObject.

In my example i wanted to do something different by using AS3 RemoteObject classes and creating Channels at runtime, so no server-config.xml is needed during compile time.