I just found an amazing article about how to protect your Zend Framework application from CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) on Good Computing Tips. It’s not an article about CSRF in specific but in form handling using the Zend Framework in general. Nevertheless I found it worth to share. Furthermore on Good Computing Tips you’ll find a couple of tricks regarding the Zend Framework such as using Zend_Navigation.
A few days ago I started the development of a new version of my CMS. In that case I also wrote an article about Test Driven Development (TDD) with the Zend Framework. But TDD is another topic. Today I’ll take a closer look on a special technique called “Nested Sets“. Nested sets are used to manage hierarchical data. Instead of walking through the results of a database in an recursive way nested sets providing the possibility to avoid recursive calls. Therefore the response time of an application can be increased extremely by using nested sets.
The journey can begin … yes, I’m starting test driven development using Zend Framework 1.10. I’m already a little advance with PHPUnit. With the Zend Framework I’m more experienced. While I was studying OnlineMedien at the Hochschule Furtwangen University I already taught my fellow students using the Zend Framework. At university I developed a tiny guest book to show the participants of my course how to use the Zend Framework.
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Every Zend Framework project starts with creating a virtual host for the project. For me as a developer using virtual hosts has several advantages. The biggest advantage, I guess, is that working with virtual hosts feels like working on a live project. Instead of using the URL http://localhost/www.project.com the developer uses the URL http://alpha.project.com. Different states of development can be detached to the URL. So it only costs a quick view to know on which development level a developers is working. Thereby I advice to use the key words alpha (project is under construction and saved local), beta (project is ready for testing and savedon line) and www (project is ready and saved on line) for the different states of development. The following tutorial now shows how I set up a virtual host in Windows XP using Zend Server CE as a local web server.
As I start developing applications using the Zend Framework a couple month ago I was confused about the project structure. On the net I found several approaches. Now, after developing applications for a few month I found my own best practice. The following list displays my Zend Framework project structure. Instead of using the basic structure I’m using a modular structure to handle modules more easy.