Continue reading »]]> I recently acquired myself a 13″ Macbook Pro, one of those new shiny unibody ones, which I now use as my primary work and freelance machine. I used to run Ubuntu on my laptop to ease freelance web development that I do with Zend Framework and WordPress etc. Mostly PHP type work.

With the Mac comes a whole host of new issues to get things going, where the more hardcore Mac fundi will install things like DarwinPorts or Fink or some such. Previously I had fink installed, and never really found that I absolutely *required* it, so this time around I’m not installing anything like DarwinPorts of Fink.

However, the underlying components to do LAMP-type development are all open-source and free, and the nice folks at MAMP put together a stellar package to ease the pain. The MAMP installer gives you everything you need, to get local web development going on a Mac. It includes Apache 2.x, Mysql 5.x, PHP 4 and PHP 5, Postfix for mail delivery, and if you’re OK with paying $$$ for MAMP Pro, you’ll get virtual hosts, PHPMyadmin, Dynamic DNS support and a whole host more features. MAMP Pro is available for a 14-day trial as well.

In summary, MAMP is a one-click-to-download one-stop app for everything you need to run a fully functional local web development setup, for all values where “P=PHP”. Perl and Python support inside MAMP is not there, for those you’ll likely need to do some hacking around, but I’m sure it’s possible. Oh, there’s one thing MAMP doesn’t give you, and that’s naturally an editing environment for your projects. IDEs for [L|W|M]AMP development is a personal choice, some people prefer gvim, others use bbedit, or textmate, or Eclipse PDT. I still use the Zend IDE, as it has nice built-in support for Zend Framework, and I’ve been testing out the beta version of the 7.0.x version, and so far it looks very good.

Continue reading »]]> New ZendFramework release out today, fixing three pages of bugs this time (A fair number of them on the newer Zend_Form stuff that was added in 1.5.0). Pretty impressive, the ZF team is quite busy.

So far in my experience with ZendFramework I’ve not come across any bugs that hindered my development or required me to log a bug or even have to do any workarounds for an irritation that I found in the framework, which I find comforting actually. It means that the functionality of ZF that I’m using (So far it’s quite limited to simple CMS-type websites, nothing complicated) is fairly mature, and became mature quite quickly.

Go team ZendFramework! You guys rock!

Continue reading »]]> I received notification today that the Zend Framework was bumped to V1.5.1, with lots of fixes to the framework itself.

We (I mean Neil) used Zend Framework for the Weylandts CMS project (A great project which finally launched last week after several delays) when I worked at OgilvyInteractive (technically, I still work there, but due to health reasons, my last official working day was last Wednesday), and I’m using the framework in a freelance project I’m doing as well. I find at times, it’s great in what it achieves and how easy it is to do certain things, but other times, like the fantastic addition of the Zend_Form classes, where things are just too much of an effort to have to jump through the hoops required. I’m not fond of reinventing the wheel, and that’s what makes the Zend Framework so nice, you only use the bits and bobs you need, and you’re not tied into a huge array of restrictions like other frameworks.