After a week delay we began Day 2 of Zend Studio for Eclipse training.  You may have read my first blog which described day 1 of training, if not, you can read it here: Zend Studio for Eclipse Training: Day 1

As with previous classes I'll use this blog to describe what we did and take general notes.

Zend Framework
The Zend Framework is composed of several components and a flexible architecture that allow you to create modern web services and websites. Included with Zend Studio is the Zend Framework which was the first topic we went over today.  During the last session we merely talked about PHP while this session jumped right into code.

Below is a picture describing how the framework functions:



Notes:

• No HTML in Controller, ever
  

Source Control
Supports SVN and CVS.  We actually already have a CVS server running on the local server here which we (John and I) use.  It currently only houses ionManager (John's new CMS) but it will hold ionFiles and all community projects in the future. Zend Studio for Eclipse has built-in support for CVS and SVN.  Using a version control system can allow multiple developers to contribute to the same project without stepping on toes.

Best Practice tips:

• Never commit broken code
• Commit one feature or bug fix at a time
• Make meaningful comments so change is understood

Database Connection
One perspective of Zend Studio is MySQL Development.  This perspective allows you to connect to a MySQL database and manage it (similar to PHPMyAdmin or Toad).  The ability to run SQL commands and view database structures/tables directly in your IDE is an incredible feature. I often have PHPMyAdmin loaded while doing PHP development with MySQL databases.  Having the ability to see and manage the database directly in Zend Studio will save time.


PHPDoc Comments
PHPDoc Comments is a method for documenting your code inline which is supported by Zend and can be automatically be generated by Zend Studio. PHPDoc looks for any comments with a preceding star and tags.  An example looks like this:


 

Tags supported by PHPDoc:
     @access
      @author
      @copyright
      @deprecated
      @example
      @ignore
      @internal
      @link
      @see
      @since
      @tutorial
      @version
      inline {@internal}}
      inline {@inheritdoc}
      inline {@link}

Read more about PHPDoc and tags here.