Hello World

Lately, the Zend_Layout component has been a very popular topic on #zftalk. It is indeed a very useful component, but a lot of people are having trouble understanding how it works.

Adding to the confusion is the outdated documentation regarding the component proposal and the equally outdated articles about Zend/Xend_Layout.

Let’s demonstrate the usage of the current Zend_Layout implementation, which can be found from the Zend Framework SVN or Snapshots in the Incubator directory.


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The HTTP protocol is what powers todays web. While not useful for most people, knowing how HTTP works is important for those who work with dynamic web sites.

Still, it seems that the protocol is mostly a mystery to a lot of developers and some features of the protocol, such as the accept-language header, aren't really used.


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We were talking about routing on the #zftalk IRC channel. One of the users mentioned that rather than using routes, he was using the __call method in the IndexController. I then asked him why is he doing that, as I knew routes would be more than a good choice for most kinds of URLs. I found out that he was working with SEO and he was using a very interesting URL scheme: domain.com/productname-numbers-categoryname.html This is actually quite interesting thing to think about. Not the SEO part, but how to make ZF understand these kind of URLs. The default routing in Zend Framework works very well for typical Zend'ish URLs like domain.com/hello/world/stuff/goes/here, but if you want to do some more specialized URLs, like the example here, you may need to do some thinking. Because ZF is so flexible, I can think of four different ways to route complex URLs:

• Using __call
• Using a controller plugin
• Using Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Regex
• Customizing the Route class

These methods can be used for other things as SEO URLs as well, so let's check out how to utilize these four and their pros and cons. Read the rest of the post at codeutopia.net

There's a lot of resources on the internet related to coding JavaScript, but many of them are poor and out of date, which I believe is one of the reasons why a lot of people still can't manage to write JavaScript code which works in all major browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari - where possible to test it)

Let's check out some useful JavaScript resources to improve our skills, ranging from books to blogs and frameworks/libraries.

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