Paul M. Jones

Quick note: the blog entries of the past few days have been converted to manual entries at the Solar website.

Views and Layouts
Using HTTP
Sending Mail

The translation went pretty quickly, because I wrote the original blog entries using Solar_Markdown, which converted them to HTML for the blog. Then I did some quick edits and re-converted them [...]

Solar comes with a reference application, Solar_App_Bookmarks. As I outlined in an earlier post about views and layouts in Solar, the bookmarks application is extended from Solar_App_Base. The Base package holds all the layouts, and those layouts are what I want to talk about in this entry.

The recent release of Solar has new mailing components; click through to read more about how to use them, and how you can use the config file to automatically configure your SMTP and mail-transport dependency injections.

As I noted in an earlier post, Solar how has classes to represent simple HTTP requests and responses.
Solar_Http_Request
The Solar_Http_Request class represents a standalone HTTP request (i.e., it’s not an HTTP client, just a request). It uses adapters, so you can (in the future) change between a cURL, pecl_http, or sockets adapter – but for [...]

The esteemed Sebastian Bergmann, author of PhpUnit, makes a great comment in my earlier post on testing and ravioli code.
In the comment, he links to the Testivus Manifestivus from Alberto Savoia, which is about as non-dogmatic about testing as you can get, while still highlighting the importance of testing. You should read the whole [...]

Do TDD and test-first dogmatism lead to ravioli code? I tend to think so, but you be the judge.

I got stiff-armed for ZendCon 2007 (apparently they don’t want presentations on competing frameworks ;-).
However, the PHP Architect folks graciously accepted two of my talk proposals for php|works 2007 in Atlanta:

Organizing Your PHP Projects, an updated version of the same talk I gave last year, and
Framework and Application Benchmarking, a presentation based on my popular [...]

Last Friday I released Solar 0.28 alpha. (As usual, the guys on the mailing list got notification of this on the same day.)
This is the first release in four months. The last time I delayed so long between releases I gave the change notes inline, but I won’t punish readers that way again. [...]

Looks like the Zend Framework project doesn’t have “complex views” settled just yet. I’m sure they’ll hit on a solution soon. In the mean time, let me show you how easy it is to work with views and layouts in Solar, including automatic format discovery and inherited layouts.
Basic Directory Structure
By way of introduction, [...]

Cal Evans at Zend has posted my Solar Overview podcast. Thanks Cal! Click through to see the transcript (”script”, really ;-) of the audio.