Mihai Corlan, one of Adobe’s platform evangelists, has written a rather exhaustive introduction to programming in Flex, specifically for current PHP developers.

When I did my first web project using Flex, boy oh boy, it was quite a switch! The clean separation between the client and the server, (the business logic on the client side in addition to business logic on the server side), client-side technology that is compiled instead of interpreted, two languages on the client, all these required a different mind-set from traditional web development. And this is my reason for writing this article. I want to share with you some of the things that are specific to Flex in relation to PHP. At the same time I want to introduce Flex by comparing it with PHP whenever this comparison makes sense.

He goes on to say that the point of this article is not to attempt to convert PHP users over to Flex. But simply that he sees Flex and PHP as choosing the ‘right tool for the job’ for different tasks.

This seems to be a great resource if you’ve been looking at adding Flex to your repertoire as a programmer either for fun or as part of a work project. The fact that it’s written to draw directly on your PHP experience makes it a must read for current PHP folks.

Ralph Schindler has a new post to his blog today looking at using dynamic assertions with the access control component (Zend_Acl) of the Zend Framework.

Over the last two years, I've seen a variety of duplicate issues come into the issue tracker, which stem from two fundamental flaws in Zend_Acl [...] In this article, we'll explore the API changes that alleviate these two problems, and we'll demonstrate how to leverage the Zend_Acl assertion system to create expressive, dynamic assertions that work with your applications models.

He mentions some of the backwards compatible changes that have been made to the ACL API including changes in the add() method and the ability to create Zend_Acl_Role and Zend_Acl_Resource objects explicitly. The rest of the post gives a great example of setting up users in a role, creating an action to test them against (can they work with a blog post?) and running a series of checks against the ACL component as a guest, contributor and publisher.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has a new post on something he's been asked about a lot - autoloading Doctrine into a Zend Framework application.

A number of people on the mailing list and twitter recently have asked how to autoload Doctrine using Zend Framework's autoloader, as well as how to autoload Doctrine models you've created. Having done a few projects using Doctrine recently, I can actually give an answer.

His short answer - "attach it to the Zend_Loader_Autoloader". For those needing the long answer, he goes through a simple example of creating the loader object, registering a new namespace and pushing in the Doctrine functionality as an autoloader. The bootstrap class can then be modified with an "_initDoctrine" method to pull in just what scripts your app might need.

Fabien Potencier has a suggestion for developers out there - don't just look at what you write as something functional that just does a job, be an artist!

Hacking is an art, and hackers should act as artists. Hackers and painters have a lot in common but I won't talk about the analogy too much as Paul Graham wrote an excellent essay and a whole book on this topic. I recommend you to read both of them if you are a hacker or a developer.

He points out that "beautiful code" is a good thing - unfortunately developers for companies may not have the luxury of writing it. He does suggest hacking on your own time, though. Not only is it good for you, getting out those ideas into working code, but it can also positively effect the applications you develop at your work.

On the Affinity Bridge blog today there's a great post looking at the use of Xdebug and KCachegrind to pinpoint bottlenecks and possible refectoring points in your code in a bit more visual way. They use an example from their own development - a script that took around twenty minutes to run.

By reducing the number of queries, making small code optimizations, and properly indexing and keying the legacy database we managed to cut the time to 10 minutes'"still we were way off target. To get a better look at what was going on, we thought it would be great to install Xdebug and take a look at it with KCacheGrind.

They show you how to get the full setup installed (on a Ubuntu system) - the LAMP stack, Xdebug and KCacheGrind. Complete commands to install, configure and run a sample debug session are all included. Sample outputs from the KCacheGrind software are there too: code structure, execution times.