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Understanding the Zend Framework, Part 2: Model-View-Controller and adding a database

Building the perfect reader

Nicholas Chase (ibmquestions@nicholaschase.com), Consultant, Backstop Media

Nicholas Chase has been involved in Web-site development for companies such as Lucent Technologies, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He has been a high school physics teacher, a low-level radioactive waste facility manager, an online science fiction magazine editor, a multimedia engineer, an Oracle instructor, and the chief technology officer of an interactive communications company. He is the author of several books, including XML Primer Plus (Sams).

Tracy Peterson (tracy@tracypeterson.com), Freelance Writer, Freelance Developer

Tracy Peterson has worked as an IT project manager and Web developer since 1997 and most recently worked as an operations program manager on MSN Search at Microsoft. He is based in San Francisco.

Summary: This "Understanding the Zend Framework" series chronicles the building of an online feed reader, Chomp, while explaining the major aspects of using the open source PHP Zend Framework. Part 1 discusses the goals behind the Zend Framework, including easy-to-use components and an architecture based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. In Part 2, you will see how to use the Zend Framework to create the beginnings of the online feed reader, Chomp, creating a form and adding information to a database while getting to know the MVC pattern.

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Date: 24 Jan 2011 (Published 11 Jul 2006)
Level: Intermediate
PDF: A4 and Letter (601 KB | 45 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

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Before you start

This tutorial is for developers who want to better understand the MVC pattern, and for those who wish to use and learn more about the Zend Framework. You'll see how to use the Zend_Controller, Zend_View, Zend_Form, and Zend_Db components as the building blocks of your web application.

About this series

This "Understanding the Zend Framework" series chronicles the building of an online feed reader, Chomp, while explaining the major aspects of using the open source PHP Zend Framework.

In Part 1 I talked about the overall concepts of the Zend Framework, including a list of relevant classes and a general discussion of the MVC pattern. Part 2 expands on that and shows how MVC can be implemented in a Zend Framework application. You will also create the user registration and login process, adding user information to the database and pulling it back out again.

Parts 3 and 4 deal with the actual RSS and Atom feeds. In Part 3, you enable users to subscribe to individual feeds and to display the items listed in those feeds. You also look at some of the Zend Framework's form-handling capabilities, validating data, and sanitizing feed items. Part 4 explains how to create a proxy to pull data from a site that has no feed.

The rest of the series involves adding value to the Chomp application. In Part 5, you look at using the PDF format as a type of backup for saved entries. In Part 6, you use the Zend_Mail module to alert users to new posts. In Part 7, you look at searching saved content and returning ranked results. In Part 8, you create your own mashup, leveraging web services from Amazon, Flickr, Twitter and Yahoo! And in Part 9, you add Ajax interactions to the site using JavaScript object notation.

About this tutorial

You'll soon begin developing with the Zend Framework. The goal is to make Chomp the perfect online feed reader. In this tutorial, you will create the basic application, including the registration and login pages, using the Zend Framework implementation of the MVC pattern and its basic database classes. You will learn:

How to set up Apache and the mod_rewrite module
How to integrate PHP V5 into Apache
Configuration changes for the Zend Framework
How to use the MVC pattern
How to create custom controllers
How to create custom actions
How to insert, extract, and update data in a database
How to use Zend's general database capabilities

At the end of this tutorial, you will have the basic framework of the application, and you'll add feeds in Part 3.

Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes that you are familiar with PHP. If you're not, check out the Resources to find the "Learning PHP" tutorial series. You should also have basic familiarity with how databases work, but you don't need to be an expert in the use of SQL.

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:

XAMPP: XAMPP is an easy-to-install version of Apache, MySQL, and PHP rolled into one. The version used for this tutorial (V1.7.3) contains Apache V2.2.14, PHP V5.3.1, and MySQL V5.1.41.

Zend Framework: This set of PHP classes is where all the work will be done. This tutorial was tested with V1.10.6.

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