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In previous articles, I've explored building service endpoints and RESTful services with Zend Framework. With RPC-style services, you get to cheat: the protocol dictates the content type (XML-RPC uses XML, JSON-RPC uses JSON, SOAP uses XML, etc.). With REST, however, you have to make choices: what serialization format will you support?

This week, I've been attending Symfony Live in Paris, speaking on integrating Zend Framework with Symfony. The experience has been quite rewarding, and certainly eye-opening for many.

In my last article, I wrote about how to get started with Zend_Application, including some information about how to write resource methods, as well as listing available resource plugins. What happens when you need a re-usable resource for which there is no existing plugin shipped? Why, write your own, of course!

Most of the iPad reactions I've read have been negative, but I have been completely satisfied with what Apple announced. iPad is exactly the product I've been wishing for ever since I wrapped my mind around the iPhone and its constraints. While the rumor mill was churning with all kinds of crazy possibilities for the Apple tablet, I mostly rolled my eyes, because I felt strongly that all Apple needed to do to revolutionize computing was simply to make an iPhone with a large screen.

Firefox 3.6 was released today. I love it. Love it. One thing I wasn’t crazy about was a behaviour change when opening links in new tabs. Before 3.6, they opened at the end of the tab row, but now they open beside the tab you are currently on. Want to change it back?

There’s been some really neat activity on the CodeIgniter front recently. Great stuff.Jamie Rumbelow has taken over as CodeIgniter Community Cheiftain, after an admirable job by the imminent Michael Wales. We’re lucky to have both as part of our community.

We added Zend_Application to Zend Framework starting in version 1.8.0. The intent behind the component was to formalize the application bootstrapping process, and provide a simplified, configuration-driven mechanism for it.

When keeping tabs on your ZF applications, it's often difficult to separate application errors from general PHP errors, and if you aggregate them in the same location as your web server errors, this can become more difficult still. Additionally, PHP's error reporting doesn't provide a ton of context, even when reporting uncaught exceptions -- typically you'll only get a cryptic exception message, and what file and line emitted it.

I just wanted to take a moment to update everyone about BambooInvoice. Although a new version hasn’t been released since April, it is still very much under active development. The next version will be 0.9, and features a series of enhancements to make Bamboo more flexible, robust, and suited to a broader array of uses.

The Internet has been incredibly empowering to creators, and just as destructive to middle men. In the 20th century, every musician needed a record label to get his or her music heard. Every author needed a publishing house to be read. Every journalist needed a newspaper. Anyone who wanted to send a message needed the post office. In the Internet age, the tail no longer wags the dog, and those middle men have become a luxury, not a necessity.