By popular demand, I’ve put together an introduction to Doctrine 1.2 integration with the Zend Framework. Doctrine is a fantastic ORM (object-relational mapping tool). If you’ve jumped from NHibernate or Hibernate and are itching to have a powerful tool for handling database relationships, Doctrine is probably your best bet. On the mailing lists, there’s a lot of talk about integrating Doctrine 2.0 into the 2.0 release of the Zend Framework. Regardless, this will help you get up to speed today. In next week’s video, I’ll show you how you can unit test those models in the Zend Framework.

Enjoy!

Edit: I spoke to Guilherme Blanco (one of the core developers behind Doctrine) and he kindly brought up some things I should bear in mind for my Doctrine / Zend set.

lastly, you can register your own CLI tasks as part of Doctrine’s CLI script or just write them in the scripts/doctrine.php file. With this, you could have your newly-generated models placed in the necessary folders. I’ll be experimenting with this in the coming week.

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One of the big things that the Zend Framework has over other frameworks is the built-in locale and language tools provided by Zend_Translate and Zend_Locale. All this comes with plugins into Zend’s templating system via Zend View Helpers. This video covers setting up some language-friendly routes, writing a custom language switcher Zend Controller Plugin and then running some a CSV-formatted language file.

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We’re going to build on what was covered in the last video and work with Zend Controller Plugins to specify a special layout for each module in our application. We’ll also look at how we can clean up the configuration of our Bootstrap.php file by moving as much configuration as possible into the application.ini file. Included in this video is a very quick look at how the Zend Framework’s resources are defined and loaded.

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I had to take a little hiatus the last few weeks, however I’m hoping to get back into a weekly posting schedule.

This video is an introduction in how to effectively use Zend Controller Plugins. The Zend Documentation refers to Zend Controller plugins being part of the Action Stack which is a simple data structure that can be filled with a bunch of plugins which will run in succession.

We’ll create a simple asset protection script using the Zend Framework’s built in Zend Controller Plugin architecture.

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A short video showing how you can test and implement Zend_Cache on a class that makes a really slow request (like a web service call).

This episode will wrap up the google docs series. You can start with Part 1 and Part 2, or jump straight into this one. With our persistence layer (the Google Docs Spreadsheet) and unit tests around geo-targetting addresses completed, we’ll tackle the view and try and visualize our data using the Google Maps API. This video will also touch on Zend_View, Zend_Controller, Zend_Registry and bootstrapping with Zend_Config. All of this wouldn’t be possible without Zend_GData. Download the source code, browse it online and don’t be shy to ask questions in the forum.

I’d like to introduce Tawfek’s sequel to his video covering Debugging in Firebug with the Zend Framework. If you’re looking for a tutorial on how to write a custom Action Helper, or wishing to make your ajax development more robust with logging and profiling, then these 33 minutes will save you a pile of googling. Download the source code or browse it online. Have a question? We’ll do our best to answer it in the forums (no registration currently required!)

This video will is part of a multi-part series on looking at how we can leverage some of Google’s API’s to build a fancy mapping tool that’s driven from a Google Docs Spreadsheet. If you haven’t worked with Google Docs or Zend_Gdata before, I suggest you take a look at the video introducing Zend_Gdata and the Google -Zend libraries. This video looks at how we can build our own very simple web service adapter for Google’s geocoding service. As with most zendcasts, I invite you to download the source code, browse it online and discuss the video in the forums.

Tawfek is back! This is part 1 of a two part series where Tawfek will be taking us through how Firebug and the Zend Framework can work together to provide non-intrusive debugging and accurate profiling information for an application. This is a great feature that every Zend Developer should know about. Browse or download the source code. Discuss in the Forums.

This video is going to be first in a small series looking at how we can integrate a small handful of the many Google APIs into a Zend Application. We’ll look at using a google docs spreadsheet as a data store and have it talk to your zend application through a small collection of unit tests. In following videos, we’ll start using the maps API for geocoding and finally plotting people to places using the Google Maps embeddeble map. Browse the source code or download the project. Discuss this video on the forum.