PHPNW10: Rowan Merewood: Practical Applications of Zend_Acl

Access Control Lists are a tool that allows us to map permissions to objects within Zend_Acl this maps to a hierarchical arrangement of roles and resources.This talk will follow through the basic use of Zend_Acl and steadily build a series of practical examples to illustrate the different methods of creating and enforcing an ACL for an application. This will include how to implement some of the more complicated hierarchical relationships and advanced conditions through the use of assertions. We will also cover the design considerations of where to attach the ACL, with the differences between applying it to controllers or models. With a functioning ACL in place, we will examine some of the methods for persisting the list and whether that list should be static or dynamic.Alongside the straight functionality of our code, we will also examine how to effectively unit test it, improving its performance and analysing the level of security that has been created.Associated Slides