 | Level: Intermediate Sean Kelly (skelly@idsociety.com), Web Application Developer, ID Society
29 Aug 2006 In previous parts of this "Understanding the Zend Framework" series, we created the basic application, the Chomp online feed reader, using the open source PHP Zend Framework. This tutorial, the ninth and final part of the series, adds an extra dimension to our feed reader by linking the online resources of Amazon.com, Yahoo!, and Flickr with our current application to create a robust mashup.
In this tutorial
This tutorial is for developers who want to learn about creating a simple mashup, a Web application that uses information from different sources. It uses the Zend Framework's Zend_Services component and the principle of Representational State Transfer (REST) to demonstrate how to seamlessly include information to extra resources related to our feeds. Using the examples of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Flickr Services, and Yahoo! Search Web services, this tutorial teaches you how to apply the PHP Zend Framework to quickly search those sites for relevant information. You will integrate this functionality into the Chomp feed reader developed in the previous parts of this series.
Prerequisites
This tutorial assumes that you have a good familiarity with PHP programming. It would be helpful if you have a general familiarity with Amazon.com, Flickr, and Yahoo!, though you do not need to know much about these sites.
System requirements
To follow along, you will need to have several pieces of software installed. This tutorial will cover installation and configuration, but make sure to download the following pieces of software. For detailed installation instructions, see Part 2.
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Apache HTTP Server
- Theoretically, you can use any HTTP server that supports PHP, but you will also need to make use of the
mod_rewrite module in order to make the MVC functionality of the Zend Framework work, so you will probably want to use Apache. For Microsoft® Windows®, make sure to download a version of Apache that is supported by PHP V5 as a module. At the time of this writing, that means Apache V2.0, not Apache V2.2. This tutorial was tested on Windows with Apache V2.0.58.
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PHP V5
- This framework requires the functionality of PHP V5.0 and higher. However, you should go with 5.1 or higher because it also uses PHP Data Objects (PDO), which come with that version. This tutorial was tested using V5.1.4.
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Zend Framework
- This set of PHP classes is where all the work will be done. The framework is still at an early stage, even though it does include quite a lot of functionality. This tutorial was tested with V0.1.3.
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MySQL
- Ultimately, you may use the Zend Framework with any database for which an adapter exists, and the database functionality will work the same way. That said, at the time of this writing, your choices are somewhat limited. This tutorial uses the MySQL database, tested with V4.0.21, but later versions should work.
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WAMP
- This is an easy-to-install version of Apache, MySQL, and PHP rolled into one package.
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AWS Access Key
- You need an Amazon Web Services access key.
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Yahoo! Application ID
- You need a Yahoo! Application ID, but first you need a Yahoo! username.
For a step-by-step guide to installing the individual pieces -- Apache, PHP, and MySQL -- on either Windows or Linux®, check out this screen cast.
Formats html, pdf
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