Sunday, August 10. 2008
Book Review: “Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP” by Quentin Zervaas
In addition to Pro PHP I also received the book, “Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP” from Apress. This is a very different book to Pro PHP. Whereas Pro PHP introduced a variety of fairly advanced topics and then left it up to us to decide when and where we could implement them in our own projects this book focuses on keeping things simple and walks us step by step through bringing a project from concept to deployment. The audience for this book is not going to be the same as that for Pro PHP. If you are already comfortable taking a project from concept to a working application this book will have little for you. If you are comfortable working with PHP, able to put together standalone tools and pages, perhaps develop a wordpress plugin but have not yet created a complete site from scratch then this may be the book that helps you “step up a gear”.
The phrase “Web 2.0” is (ab)used all too often these days but there isn’t (too) much to worry about with the use of the phrase here. Web 2.0 is used as a convenient way to introduce standards compliant HTML, AJAX, microformats and mashups. Through the 545 pages of this book we slowly build up a blogging platform (think wordpress.com) supporting images, tagging and geographical data displayed using google maps. This is brought together well with the possible exception of google maps which feels as though it has been forced into the site concept so the author can discuss web services.
This is unfortunate as, in a book which was very easy to follow, the chapter dealing with implementing google maps was particularly good. For a book like this which deals with issues for which there are almost as many “right” answers as there are PHP developers it is easy to find things I would have done differently. I would have developed a geographically aware image hosting app with optional blogging whereas the author developed a blogging app with optional images and geographical data. I would have created a users table with each attribute in a separate row whereas the author followed what I can best describe as a denormalised EAV approach. None of this actually matters, this book sets out to offer one approach to implementing a feature rich and complete website and in this goal it succeeds admirably.
The book begins in chapter one by planning the application and touches on a few other issues including search engine optimisation, commenting, unit testing and version control. Perhaps strangely unit testing and version control are encouraged but not used in this book. The format of the book, creating basic functionality in the earlier chapters and then building on it later, would certainly work well with both unit testing and version control. The concept is introduced “as-is” and although it works as a summary of what is to come I would have liked to see some discussion of approaches the reader might take in arriving at such a specification.
Chapter two deals with setting up the web server, application directories, downloading the various libraries which are going to be used and then setting up logging functionality. The Zend Framework (ZF) is used as the basis for the application. At the time this book was written the latest version of ZF was 1.0.2. This means that things like Zend_Form, which are now popular components of the ZF, were not available. Instead the author gives us a couple of scripts to handle form processing and interacting with the database which he has previously developed. PEAR packages and Smarty are also used on the server side and prototype and script.aculo.us used on the browser side.
With the exception of chapter five, which introduces prototype and scriptaculous, chapters three to thirteen build up the application. As might be expected code samples dominate in this book. The accompanying explanations are detailed and easy to follow though and by building on previous chapters avoid coming across as repetitive.
Chapter fourteen looks at deployment and maintenance. Much of this chapter deals with building out the application logging functionality, handling site errors and adding an administration area to the site. Although these are all important areas I feel as though the chapter has been misnamed. The chapter only goes on to look at deployment and managing backups in the final few pages of the book. Alternate config settings for development and production servers are dealt with particularly well. I’ve seen discussion of Zend_Config’s ability to handle inheritance of settings and how the application can “know” which server it is on and use the appropriate settings previously. This book is the first place I’ve seen a practical implementation of this though.
Overall this is a very solid and practical guide to creating web (2.0) applications from scratch with some real gems thrown in. It isn’t going to be for everyone but if you are looking to move from working on small projects to complete applications this book will likely speed you on your way.
p.s. If you're interested in the book be sure to check out the sample chapter and if you decide to buy don't ignore the supporting website
The phrase “Web 2.0” is (ab)used all too often these days but there isn’t (too) much to worry about with the use of the phrase here. Web 2.0 is used as a convenient way to introduce standards compliant HTML, AJAX, microformats and mashups. Through the 545 pages of this book we slowly build up a blogging platform (think wordpress.com) supporting images, tagging and geographical data displayed using google maps. This is brought together well with the possible exception of google maps which feels as though it has been forced into the site concept so the author can discuss web services.
This is unfortunate as, in a book which was very easy to follow, the chapter dealing with implementing google maps was particularly good. For a book like this which deals with issues for which there are almost as many “right” answers as there are PHP developers it is easy to find things I would have done differently. I would have developed a geographically aware image hosting app with optional blogging whereas the author developed a blogging app with optional images and geographical data. I would have created a users table with each attribute in a separate row whereas the author followed what I can best describe as a denormalised EAV approach. None of this actually matters, this book sets out to offer one approach to implementing a feature rich and complete website and in this goal it succeeds admirably.
The book begins in chapter one by planning the application and touches on a few other issues including search engine optimisation, commenting, unit testing and version control. Perhaps strangely unit testing and version control are encouraged but not used in this book. The format of the book, creating basic functionality in the earlier chapters and then building on it later, would certainly work well with both unit testing and version control. The concept is introduced “as-is” and although it works as a summary of what is to come I would have liked to see some discussion of approaches the reader might take in arriving at such a specification.
Chapter two deals with setting up the web server, application directories, downloading the various libraries which are going to be used and then setting up logging functionality. The Zend Framework (ZF) is used as the basis for the application. At the time this book was written the latest version of ZF was 1.0.2. This means that things like Zend_Form, which are now popular components of the ZF, were not available. Instead the author gives us a couple of scripts to handle form processing and interacting with the database which he has previously developed. PEAR packages and Smarty are also used on the server side and prototype and script.aculo.us used on the browser side.
With the exception of chapter five, which introduces prototype and scriptaculous, chapters three to thirteen build up the application. As might be expected code samples dominate in this book. The accompanying explanations are detailed and easy to follow though and by building on previous chapters avoid coming across as repetitive.
Chapter fourteen looks at deployment and maintenance. Much of this chapter deals with building out the application logging functionality, handling site errors and adding an administration area to the site. Although these are all important areas I feel as though the chapter has been misnamed. The chapter only goes on to look at deployment and managing backups in the final few pages of the book. Alternate config settings for development and production servers are dealt with particularly well. I’ve seen discussion of Zend_Config’s ability to handle inheritance of settings and how the application can “know” which server it is on and use the appropriate settings previously. This book is the first place I’ve seen a practical implementation of this though.
Overall this is a very solid and practical guide to creating web (2.0) applications from scratch with some real gems thrown in. It isn’t going to be for everyone but if you are looking to move from working on small projects to complete applications this book will likely speed you on your way.
p.s. If you're interested in the book be sure to check out the sample chapter and if you decide to buy don't ignore the supporting website
