PHP7 officially released

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.0.0. This release marks the start of the new major PHP 7 series.

PHP 7.0.0 comes with a new version of the Zend Engine, numerous improvements and new features such as

Creating our first Module

Zend Framework 2 module is characterised by a defined directory structure and a few files that have to be part of every module.

The module can be created with all the basic directory and files if we installed zftool but we are going to create the module manually to give us a better understanding.

First we are going to create a folder that would represent our module inside the module directory (i.e. C:\xampp\htdocs\zfnigeria\module). Our module would be called, “Apps”.

If you have done that we should then have two folders inside of the module folder, Application and Apps. See screen cast below.

Module System

The module’s manager in ZF2 was written by Evan Coury who described it as “a re-usable piece of functionality that can be used to construct a more complex application.”

The structure of ZF2 module is as shown below but even contains more. Normally this would be inside another folder bearing the name of the folder.

  

MVC Implementation

As a beginner like me you would find some of the terms in Zend Framework frightening but here I am going to use the simplest explanations that helped my understanding.

MVC (Model, View & Controller) is a “design pattern” (another word you I would explain later) which allows application business logic to be separated from the user interface and data models, such that they can be manipulated independent of each other.

In the past when developing a PHP application, the typical approach is to embed PHP code into one or more HTML documents using special delimiters. This made it easy to construct dynamic Web pages containing programming constructs like variables and function’s calls; simply alter the values of the variables embedded within the HTML code, and the content displayed on the page changes appropriately.

A Quick look at Zend Framwork 2

In our last tutorial, “Installing Zend Framework 2” we were able to get our application running without really bothering ourselves about the structure of the Framework. Now we are going to look at some basic concepts that drive the Framework. Among them are:-

• MVC Implementation
• Module System
• Event System
• Service System
• Decoupling
• Namespaces
• Auto loading
• PSR-2 Coding Standard

These are by no way the only concept in ZF2 but would help us to understand the structure and working of ZF2. Let me also say that you would definitely find the Framework manual very useful. You can read the manual at Read the document or at the Framework website.

Installing Zend Framework

Before we move on with the installation let it be know we are referring to Zend Framework 2 (Zf2) whenever we say Zend Framework.

The first major release of Zend Framework was Zend Framework 1 and as at the time of this tutorials the next version of Zend Framework, which is Zend Framework 3 was already near completion.

 To make the installation of Zf2 easy the Zf team created the “ZendSkeletonApplication”, which is basically a template to start developing any website from, it hosted on git.

Installing Netbeans, MySQL Workbench and Git

This is not necessary a tutorial on installing these application but an area of note when you install these application.

The installations are through wizards just follow it till you reach the end but take note of the following.