Andries Seutens - Modern Web Development

I have submitted a proposal for Zend_Tree months ago, but it seemed like the timing wasn’t right. I also believe that the naming convention “Tree” is causing a lot of confusion, and that the proposal could use some serious refactoring. The way I see this component, is more like a “background component” that manipulates, stores, hierarchical data.

We have already demonstrated a numerous amount for the need and value of a basic, simple class wrapping PHP arrays. Tree-like manipulation of such arrays might also prove useful to some core ZF components, such as Zend_Session, Zend_Acl, Zend_Registry, and Zend_Config.

The ZF goals include consistency. Factoring common code into a shared API helps this goal.

We have requested for expanding our group think/brainstorm to include what “tree” functions might be needed by these components. But until now there hasn’t been much (not to say none) feedback on this.
Condsider the following example (thanks Gavin):

Given a user, user session, and a “social” website (like myspace.com), perhaps a model populates a list of the user’s friends who are online. If this “tree” of data were saved to the registry, I can imagine business logic processing that data and deciding to move some or all of the resulting data into the user’s session. The move might result in a merging of values with an existing namespace in the user’s session, or the creation of a new namespace, both “tree” operations. Both Zend_Session and Zend_Acl appear to have several reasons to modify or display some or all of their “tree” data structures, sometimes in ways more complex than provided by simple accessors.

Darby Felton and Gavin Vess, made a proposol for Zend_Authentication. I went trough it and did some research. Here’s my point of view.

Authentication is any process by which you verify that someone is who they claim they are. This usually involves a username and a password, but can include any other method of demonstrating identity.

Access control hower, is a much more general way of talking about controlling access to a web resource (very abstract). Access can be granted or denied based on a very wide variety of criteria, such as the network address of the client, username, password, the time of day, the phase of the moon, or the browser which the visitor is using.

These techniques are so closely related in most real applications, it is difficult to talk about them separate from one another. However I think that it is a pretty big design decision that has to be made. Do we make a difference between these two, or do we wrapthem in one class?

I would like to ask for brainstorm time, where we can openly consider all ideas to help synthesize a final proposal, before further decisions are made.

Gavin Vess from Zend Studio’s proposed a major change for the Zend Framework’s manual. Currently, the manual is build using docbook. This can be a serious hassle for those willing to contribute to the manual (Subversion, docbook, compiling, etc …) The proposed change is to move from docbook to wiki.

I will be working on the automatic translation of docbook to HTML, docbook to Wiki, and Wiki to docbook, which is currently in progress. I hope that I will be able to finish the docbook to wiki script by next weekend, so we can do an initial test import for the English manual.

The English manual will be used for testing, and if everything works out well, a full conversion for each language will follow.

Why switch to wiki?

• Make smaller edits easier, and possible by at least everyone on the documentation / translation teams, possibly including all CLA signers.
• Reduce the learning curve and effort required to make edits to the manual and translations.
• Allow anyone to comment on each section, but with comment moderation, so that the manual can evolve more quickly and with more flexibility than the current process.
• Need notification system for edits (e.g. the wiki “watch”/notifications feature)

What are future plans for the manual?

• Improving syntax highlighting.
• Quick access: type http://framework.zend.com/zend_controller similar to php.net, where you can easily access a specific function by appending it to the url.
• Automatically generate HTML and PDF for each language, either directly from the wiki, or from docbook, after auto-generating docbook from the wiki.

More suggestions are welcome!

*update*

A first draft can be seen here.