Integration of Frameworks for Rapid Web Development

These days LAMP is the basic foundation upon which websites are built. On top of your LAMP stack your application can grow to a monstrous size and complexity. Even small web sites can organically grow into monsters that leave the developers shaking their heads. Everyone suggests that they have the killer framework, but this session is about integrating best of breed frameworks and libraries to create a super integrated platform on which to run your application. This development platform builds on existing technologies and brings them together in a way that allows developers to move onto the real tasks of building applications.

We will expand upon the MVC model of the Zend Framework using the Smarty templating system, mix in the Yahoo Interface Toolset for Ajax and a few other custom libraries which glue it all together to create our integrated development platform.

Some of the things we’ll cover:

• Integrating a MVC architecture of Zend with other libraries like Smarty and YUI
• Best practices for integrating libraries into your code
• Zend Framework’s Database, Cookie and Session Management
• Using a platform such as this to deploy localized content
• Rapid administration builders for your MySQL-based application
• Xdebug for Debugging and Profiling

About one third of the presentation will be to explain the setup and the features of our platform, two thirds will be an on-screen demonstration how to create a basic but fully featured Web Application using this platform showing how all the components work together. This will include a little restricted area to introduce the Zend Framework’s Authorization libraries, Access Control and Session Management. We will show how rapidly such an application can be deployed and the relative performance of such applications.

To show the wide varieties of use such a platform could be used on will be two sample apps using this integrated platform:

• the next generation of the db4free.net website, a site which allows users to register and manage database accounts with the most recent MySQL versions for testing.
• a personal photography site in uploading, managing and displaying photographs.