pow($zend, 3) // or three zend posts in one

Three pieces of zend news today:

Firstly - I passed my Zend PHP5 Certification exam yesterday (\o/). I’ve been thinking of taking the exam for some time, and finally got round to it when my employer offered to pay for the test. It was rather more difficult than I expected - but there were very few questions that required arcane knowledge of the order of arguments to PHP functions (which I use the manual and Zend Studio’s auto-complete for). It does focus quite a lot on SOAP and webservices, but the php|arch certification guide I bought warned me about that.

Secondly, I’ve given up with Zend Studio Neon - it has a huge amount of useful stuff that Eclipse PDT doesn’t - like get/setter generation, code formatting, PHPUnit support, and the other stuff listed here. However - I just can’t get on with the ‘project’ system. All I want is to be able to browse the file system in the LHS pane - and that doesn’t seem to be something its willing to let me do. I don’t want to individually add files & folders to my project, or manage include paths, or have .kpf files dotted around that I have to tell subversion to ignore. So I’m back to Zend Studio 5.5 pro, which doesn’t have this annoyance. I normally on windows with with a VM or separate development hardware sharing my home directory through samba and then mapping that as a drive in Windows. I then browse this mapped network drive with my editor/IDE. If anyone knows how to get this to work in PDT or Neon (or Komodo, which I had the same issue with) I’d love to hear from you.

Finally, because I’m not above a bit of gratuitous plugging, in an effort to win a book, and because I needed a third Zend related topic for this post. If you haven’t listened to PHP Abstract yet, then you might want to add it to your list of things to listen to - its worth it alone for Cal Evans‘ cheesy intro and post script. The latest episode is an interview Cal did with Sean Coates of php|architect (and one of the hosts of the other php podcast). PHP Abstract is much more frequent than the other podcast, and with considerably less rambling - each episode lasts about 10 minutes and is given by a range of people from the PHP community. Cal’s own ‘How to kill a software project’ is very funny.

6 Responses to “pow($zend, 3) // or three zend posts in one”

  1. Paulg Says:

    Congrats to us two - got mine on Monday!

    Personally the php4 php5 differences really ate up too much learning time when I haven’t used php4 for nearly 3 years …

  2. Aaron Saray Says:

    Neon projects… are these like the Eclipse PDT projects - or is there a difference? For eclipse PDT, I got a little wary of the projects, but I got this tip:
    1) Create your new PHP project named after the project, or the repository, or something.
    2) Right click, new folder.
    3) Click Advanced, link to the file system.

    Bingo! It keeps your project files outside of your code repo - and allows you to make changes in Eclipse or on the file system.

    Good luck! I’ve not used Zend Studio yet, so I can’t make any smart comparisons. :)

  3. Sean Coates Says:

    people LIKE the rambling… for some reason… (-:

    S

  4. Marc Gear Says:

    Aaron - thats great - I gave it ago and i’m getting on much better with it now

    Sean - I’m a big fan of the podcast - I get odd looks on the tube when I laugh out loud at how offtopic you and Paul can get. Keep up it up.

  5. Gustavo Carreno Says:

    Congrats,

    You won this weeks BOOK !!!

  6. PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 25: An Interview With Sara Golemon | PHP Podcasts Says:

    […] Marc Gear […]

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