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I successfully passed my Zend Framework certification exam couple weeks ago.  It has certainly been a challenging preparation for the past one and half month considering the scarcity of information about this exam available online. So I thought of sharing my exam prep in this post which can be useful for others who might take the exam in the near future.

Materials that I used:

• Zend Framework Certification Study Guide
  http://downloads.zend.com/framework/generic/ZFC_Study_Guide_v1.pdf
  
• “Zend Framework in Action” book by Rob Allen
  http://www.zendframeworkinaction.com/
  This is a great book about ZF by Rob Allen. I strongly recommend this. I would also suggest going through his website, it contains excellent resources for Zend Framework and ZFCE.
  http://akrabat.com/
  

• ZF Programmers Reference and ZF Source code (v1.5)
  Every other blog post on ZFCE preparation will point you in this direction. It is so very important to go through the code and understand the real functions. As developers we might find it hard sometimes to read pages and pages of documentation. I have felt it, like when I was reading one chapter in the study guide, I felt very boring, but  the moment I browsed through the code, It was like I grasped everything in 1/10th the time.
• Version is Zend Framework 1.5
  Always remember this exam is based on v1.5 and anything introduced in the newer versions will not be asked about in the exam. So if you are only looking from the exams perspective, you can limit your scope to just the 1.5 version.

My preparation for the exam

• Went through the study guide twice or thrice, and familiarized myself well enough with the chapters and sections
• Made a list of all the Classes, Methods and Constants used in the study guide
• Cross referenced the stuff in the ZF Study guide and studied the concepts in Rob Allen book. Didn’t have to spend too much time studying outside the scope of the book. I would say you wouldn’t even have to study the entire book, just reference the chapters in the study guide. At this point you would have covered all theory concepts that you need to know.
• Now I had a list of all the Classes, Functions and Constants, just studied them and their related functions and classes with the help “ZF Programmers Reference”. E.g. If the study guide talks about Zend_Memory::factory() and the book talks about Zend_Memory_Manager::create() also read up about Zend_Memory_Manager::createLocked() — related function, can be found in the ZF Programmers Reference. At this point I had covered all ZF Technicals (class/fn/constant names) that were needed scoped in the exam curriculum.
• Exams will be a mix of PHP Concepts, ZF Theory and ZF Technicals. I am not sure if you are already a ZCE, but as far as I know ZFCE is also a “unit-wise-pass” exam like ZCE. So studying all units is mandatory (I am just doing a presumed guess… I may be wrong by 99.9999989% here).
• I found a lot of trick questions, so beware!! One of my colleagues suggested a way to handle trick questions in exams: “Never look at the choices until you are sure that you don’t know the answer”, I think it works well. The choices are the confusing part in the trick questions, and they can confuse you even if you had known the answer, so try to find the answer before looking at the choices.
• Exams is for 75 Question in 90 mins, I finished it in about 30 mins and took 10 mins for review.
• If all goes well you get to use this logo in your CV
  

All the best!!

Zend Framework and Zend Gdata API provide a simple and effective solution to display pictures and galleries from your picasa account in your own custom website. Lets take one of the public galleries in picasa show it in a custom php page in this website.

Zend Framework
Before we start. In order to use Zend Gdata API, you need to have Zend framework (1.6 or higher) installed, If you have the full framework package installed , you won’t need to worry about anything, you can go ahead and start calling the APIs directly, In case if you don’t have the full framework package installed, you will have to download and configure Google Data Client Library. Details of setup and configuration are listed in the following link

http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/articles/php_client_lib.html#gdata-installation

CODE
The following url refers to a public picasa gallery

http://picasaweb.google.com/shasankar/SampleGallery#

The URL has two important pointers, the picasa user id the one that follows the picasaweb.google.com domain, its usually the picasa user name, in some cases it can also be a long alphanumeric string, this is the user id, the other one is the gallery name, in this case it is ‘SampleGallery’

The following script allows you to load pictured directly into your website

<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL);
require_once 'Zend/Loader.php';
Zend_Loader::loadClass('Zend_Gdata_Photos');

// Album and User
$sUserID = "shasankar";
$sAlbumName = "SampleGallery";

$serviceName = Zend_Gdata_Photos::AUTH_SERVICE_NAME;
$gp = new Zend_Gdata_Photos();
$query = $gp->newAlbumQuery();
$query->setUser($sUserID);
$query->setAlbumName($sAlbumName);
$query->setImgMax("800");
$query->setThumbSize("160");
$albumFeed = $gp->getAlbumFeed($query);
$sPrintThumbs = "";

foreach ($albumFeed as $albumEntry) {
if ($albumEntry->getMediaGroup()->getThumbnail() != null) {
// Load Thumbnail Info
$mediaThumbnailArray = $albumEntry->getMediaGroup()->getThumbnail();
$ThumbnailUrl = $mediaThumbnailArray[0]->getUrl();
$ThumbnailHeight = $mediaThumbnailArray[0]->getHeight();
$ThumbnailWidth = $mediaThumbnailArray[0]->getWidth();
// Load Picture Info
$mediaArray = $albumEntry->getMediaGroup()->getContent();
$ImageUrl = $mediaArray[0]->getUrl();
$sImageTitle = $albumEntry->getMediaGroup()->getDescription()->text;
$url = $albumEntry->getLink('alternate')->href;

$sLinkString = <<<LTEXT
<a href="$ImageUrl" title="$sImageTitle"><img src="$ThumbnailUrl" width="$ThumbnailWidth" height="$ThumbnailHeight" /></a>
LTEXT;
$sPrintThumbs .=$sLinkString ;
}
}
?>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title> Loading pictures from Picasa Gallery</title>
</head>
<body >
<div>
<div>
<h3>SampleGallery (Picasa)</h3>

</div>
<div>
<?php echo $sPrintThumbs; ?>
</div>
</div>
<div class="clear"></div>
</body>
</html>

The Api allows lot of customization options, thumbnail size, final image size, number of results per page, etc, these setting have to passed along with the Album query that is sent to picasa.

Picasa album in Custom Webpage

Related Links

If you want to display private picasa galleries in your website, you can make use of zend authentication api, you can read more about it here

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-picasalbum/#c5

The ’CustomConfigurationsPath’ setting of FCK editor provides a great deal of customizations and configurations for users of FCKEditor. I was implementing FCK editor in one of the projects and the default interface toolbars occupy almost 50 % of the screen area of the editor control. Most of the toolbar options are unnecessary, so I used the ‘’CustomConfigurationsPath’ property to provide FCKEditor with a custom configuration file to get the right settings.

Default Code

/TestProject/test1.php

include_once 'includes/fckeditor/fckeditor.php';
$oFCKeditor = new FCKeditor('txtQuesText') ;
$oFCKeditor->BasePath = './includes/fckeditor/' ;
$oFCKeditor->Width = 600;
$oFCKeditor->Height = 300;
$oFCKeditor->Value = '' ;
$oFCKeditor->Create() ;

The code will render as follows

In order to customize the FCK editor, you will have create a FCK Editor Setting file, like the following javascript file
/TestProject/includes/fck_editor_config.js

FCKConfig.ToolbarSets["TestToolbar"] = [
['Source','-'],
['Bold','Italic','Underline','StrikeThrough','-','Subscript','Superscript'],
['OrderedList','UnorderedList','-'],
['JustifyLeft','JustifyCenter','JustifyRight','JustifyFull'],
['Link','Unlink'],
];

The settings file has to be connected to the PHP script that loads the FCKEditor and the appropriate settings that have to be loaded have to be configured in the PHP Script (in this case it is “TestToolbar”). This methods, multiple settings to be configured as a part of the settings file and allows dynamic swapping of editor control properties.

PHP Script with settings file loaded

$oFCKeditor = new FCKeditor('txtQuesText') ;
$oFCKeditor->BasePath = './includes/fckeditor/' ;
$oFCKeditor->Config["CustomConfigurationsPath"] = "/TestProject/includes/fck_editor_config.js";
$oFCKeditor->ToolbarSet = 'TestToolbar';
$oFCKeditor->Width = 600;
$oFCKeditor->Height = 200;
$oFCKeditor->Value = '' ;
$oFCKeditor->Create() ;

Result

There are a whole bunch of systems that are involved in setting up development environments, some of them range from issue trackers to version control systems and even text editors. Everyone has some preference, choice and a point-of view about things, and so do I. Here is my list of essential systems and software from a good open source web development environment. I have classified my list into multiple categories 

Collaboration Tools

• Issue Tracking : Bugzilla

Bugzilla is by far the coolest bug tracking system I have ever seen in the opensource market. I like bugzilla because of its simplistic approach to bug tracking. It gives what you need in a simple user interface and its easy to configure and integrate. 

• Project Management: MediaWiki

You should call me nuts for calling MediaWiki a project management software. Yet if you ask me about project management, i would say mediawiki does the job. Project Management primarily for micro-development teams is about collaboration, information sharing in a semi organized way. Of all the tools that i evaluated for project management, if found media wiki to be only one perfectly doing the job.

• Version Control: Subversion

Subversion is a class apart; it was chosen as the version control system without even evaluation. Its really quick, easily manageable, has certainly good reliability and access controls. 

• Version Control Web GUI: Sventon

There are a lot of good (better) subversion WebGUIs available for subversion, but I choose this one because this was free, and it gave me what I needed.

Development Environment

• Windows Environments

Web Server : Apache (or) IIS

IDE: Eclipse (or) Zend Studio, Dreamweaver**

TortoiseSVN - the ultimate choice

Windows Stack: XAMPP

• Linux Environments

Web Server : Apache

IDE: Eclipse/PDT (or) Zend Studio

KDE SVN Client or Some SVN Client

• Database: MySQL
• Eclipse Plugins

PDT for Eclipse

Subclipse for Eclipse

Takstop for Eclipse integrated with Bugzilla works a as a great issue tracking client.

Zend Studio is a must have if you are a php developer, zend studio comes with a whole lot of features and tools that help in increasing the efficiency of php development.

** Dreamweaver is not an open source software; there are practically no opensource tools to match Dreamweaver in Web designing IDE’s. 

pChart is a charting library for PHP that allows generation of dynamic good looking GD based charts. Ever since I saw a small demo of charts in their website, it was attracted to try this product; I didn’t get a chance until last week.

Installing pChart in XAMPP and in Linux (Ubuntu)

The ‘pChart‘ download comes with a numerous list of files and folders, although you will need only about two major folders. They are

• /pChart
• /Fonts

In XAMPP

You can copy both the folders to your global includes folder, so that they can be accessed from anywhere across the system. Say C:\xampp\php-includes\pChart and
C:\xampp\php-includes\Fonts or you can reference them directly using the full path name. The library includes are usually kept outside the htdocs folder for security reasons.

In Linux (Ubuntu)

You can copy both the folders to your global includes folder, so that they can be accessed from anywhere across the system. Say /var/www/php-includes/pChart and
/var/www/php-includes/fonts or you can reference them directly using the full path name.

In this example of creating a bar chart we will use XAMPP, full paths, whereas the examples provided in the pChart download will tell you about how to use the includes folder option. It is best add the folder to the php include setting, so that it can be referenced from anywhere.

Configuring the pChart charting setup in XAMPP

Now we will start placing the php file that will generate the chart, lets create some folders called

• C:\xampp\htdocs\charting-test\
• C:\xampp\htdocs\charting-test\cache-images\

Now create a file called index.php in charting-test folder that will generate the chart. The generated charts are stored in cache-images folder and can be rendered from that folder.

<?php
define ('CHART_ENGINE_ROOT','C:\\xampp\\php-includes\\');
include_once CHART_ENGINE_ROOT.'pChart\\pChart.class';
include_once CHART_ENGINE_ROOT.'pChart\\pData.class';

$chartFileName = $_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME']."_testChart.png";

$dataRow = Array();
$dataRow[0]['studentName']= "Praveen";
$dataRow[0]['studentMarks']= 52;
$dataRow[1]['studentName']= "Krishna";
$dataRow[1]['studentMarks']= 20;
$dataRow[2]['studentName']= "Joseph";
$dataRow[2]['studentMarks']= 35;
$dataRow[3]['studentName']= "Deepak";
$dataRow[3]['studentMarks']= 26;
$dataRow[4]['studentName']= "Martin";
$dataRow[4]['studentMarks']= 37;
$dataRow[5]['studentName']= "Vijay";
$dataRow[5]['studentMarks']= 19;

// Dataset definition
$DataSet = new pData;
for ($i=0; $i<6; $i++) {
$dispStudName = $dataRow[$i]['studentName'];
$dispStudMarks = $dataRow[$i]['studentMarks'];
$DataSet->AddPoint($dispStudName,"Names");
$DataSet->AddPoint($dispStudMarks,"Marks");
}
$DataSet->AddAllSeries();
$DataSet->RemoveSerie("Names");
$DataSet->SetAbsciseLabelSerie("Names");
$DataSet->SetSerieName("Marks","Marks");
$DataSet->SetYAxisName("Marks");

// Initialise the graph
$Test = new pChart(700,270);
$Test->setFontProperties(CHART_ENGINE_ROOT."Fonts\\tahoma.ttf",9);
$Test->setGraphArea(70,30,680,200);
$Test->drawFilledRoundedRectangle(7,7,693,263,5,240,240,240);
$Test->drawRoundedRectangle(5,5,695,265,5,270,270,270);
$Test->drawGraphArea(255,255,255,TRUE);
$Test->drawScale($DataSet->GetData(),$DataSet->GetDataDescription(),SCALE_NORMAL,150,150,150,TRUE,45,2,TRUE);
$Test->drawGrid(4,TRUE,230,230,230,50);

// Draw the 0 line
$Test->setFontProperties(CHART_ENGINE_ROOT."Fonts\\tahoma.ttf",6);
$Test->drawTreshold(0,143,55,72,TRUE,TRUE);

// Draw the bar graph
$Test->drawBarGraph($DataSet->GetData(),$DataSet->GetDataDescription());

// Finish the graph
$Test->setFontProperties(CHART_ENGINE_ROOT."Fonts\\tahoma.ttf",8);
$Test->drawLegend(575,35,$DataSet->GetDataDescription(),255,255,255);
$Test->setFontProperties(CHART_ENGINE_ROOT."Fonts\\tahoma.ttf",10);
$Test->drawTitle(60,22,"Student Marks Comparision",50,50,50,585);
$Test->Render("cache-images/".$chartFileName);
$Test->ReportWarnings();

$webPrintStr = <<<
<img src="cache-images/$chartFileName" alt="" />
ETEXT;

echo $webPrintStr;
?>

Resulting Chart

The charts are really cool