Free Zend Framework Screencasts - Zendcasts

This video will is part of a multi-part series on looking at how we can leverage some of Google’s API’s to build a fancy mapping tool that’s driven from a Google Docs Spreadsheet. If you haven’t worked with Google Docs or Zend_Gdata before, I suggest you take a look at the video introducing Zend_Gdata and the Google -Zend libraries. This video looks at how we can build our own very simple web service adapter for Google’s geocoding service. As with most zendcasts, I invite you to download the source code, browse it online and discuss the video in the forums.
 

so here’s my makeup video for last week’s absence. It’s a little on the long end (nearing 40 mintues), however in my defense, I’m trying to cover a lot of ground. The video covers how you can build a very basic JSON web service with some private key authentication. I think that I muddled through the description, so I invite you to look at the Wikipedia entry on private / public key cryptography.

I start by producing a simple Business Object for countries, which then becomes a web service. With some credentials for authentication stored in Zend_Config_Ini, I go through the motions of writing a wrapper around Zend_HttpClient for handling requests with our home-grown country list web service. This approach was adapted from a web service I’ve been working on for a client recently, that I’ve found light and easy to write for RESTful calls. Following along with the source code might also be helpful. Grab yourself a copy of the source code here.

This podcast is a two-parter: Zend_Config_Ini and Zend_Http_Client(). While the two classes aren’t married together in the video, anyone serious about writing an API to their web application will need to access the API differently in development, staging and production environments.

We also take 10 minutes and 4 lines of code to work with the Twitter API. Jump to around the 15 minute mark if you’re already up to speed on Zend_Config_*.

I’m trying to cover the basic classes required to write a web service in the video next week. I’ve gotten a couple emails about covering Zend_Db. Since this podcast has covered Zend_Controller_* and Zend_View_* classes, the Zend_Db_* are starting to appear as the odd class out. I’m hoping to introduce Zend_Db by mid April.

View / download the source on Google Code