5 tips and tools to develop php applications fast

When web applications like basecamp started appearing, a lot of attention started turning to Ruby on Rails.  Suddenly small groups of technically driven people could release powerful applications in a month or two.  With this awareness, the usability standards for web applications increased and so did the technical challenges for web developers and designers.  This movement sort of left php developers in the dust for a while.  While CakePHP and other frameworks came to the rescue, it didn’t seem like the php community wanted to match Ruby on Rails.  If anything, php has been looking to retain its strong foundations of being built upon a powerful, easy to use library and integrating new “web 2.0″ like ideas to do more than Ruby on Rails.

In this post, I will discuss 5 tips and tools that the php community has provided to speed up development time and improve code quality.  These should help you out if you don’t already know them, but if you do I would like to hear what you use to speed up your development time.

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Integrating AJAX/Dojo into the Zend MVC in 8 steps.

Introduction

If you have been following the Zend Framework at all, you’ll know that Dojo has been selected as the UI library to be adopted into the Zend Framework. The question is what does this exactly mean? I’m still trying to figure out how they are going to use dojo, but right now with release 1.6 you can create dojo widgets (e.g. – date pickers, currency boxes, specialized buttons etc…) in code with the Zend_Dojo object. That being said, you still need to learn a few more things to create a useful and reusable AjAX framework with Zend.

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Creating custom tooltips by extending Dojo’s Dijits – in 8 Steps

Introduction

Tooltips are nice small additions that can improve the user experience. They are so common that Dojo and other javascript frameworks provide precanned ways of creating them. In dojo, they provide dijits (their widgets) that can do some amazing things on the user interaction side. That being said, when you want to customize them in any way, you can run into many walls.

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