Zend Framework in Action

Cal Evans is reporting on DevZone that Zend Framework has won a “Jolt Productivity Award”.

Well done to the team and all the contributors.

Posted by Rob on 6th March 2008 under Around the web & News | No Comments »

The release-1.5 subversion branch of Zend Framework will be frozen tomorrow (at 9pm PST) in preparation for the release of the second release candidate for 1.5. The intention is to have all the new work for 1.5 completed by then. Going forward to release, only bug fixes should be necessary.

For components that are not ready for 1.5, it is intended to ship a separate incubator directory with 1.5. Depending on timescales, this may be released after the release of 1.5 though. The components in the incubator directory will include those that are not of high enough quality yet or that the proposed API hasn’t been exposed to enough developers to ensure that they provide the correct amount of flexibility vs ease-of-use.

Full information is on this thread on Nabble.

Posted by Rob on 6th March 2008 under News | 2 Comments »

The final release of the 1.0 series of Zend Framework, version 1.0.4 has been released. This release fixes 111 known issues and means that the 1.0 branch is as bug free as possible and it is now time to move on the forthcoming 1.5 release.

On that note, the first release candidate for Zend Framework 1.5 was also released today. From the announcement, the new features for 1.5 include:

• New Zend_Form component with support for AJAX-enabled form elements
• New action and view helpers for automating and facilitating AJAX requests and alternate response formats
• Infocard and OpenID authentication adapters
• Support for complex Lucene searches, including fuzzy, date-range, and wildcard queries
• Support for Lucene 2.1 index file format
• Partial, Placeholder, Action, and Header view helpers for advanced view composition and rendering
• New Zend_Layout component for automating and facilitating site layouts
• UTF-8 support for PDF documents
• New Technorati and SlideShare web services

Both releases are available at http://framework.zend.com/download.

Posted by Rob on 26th February 2008 under News | No Comments »

Zend_Form has been promoted from the incubator to the main library code-base of the framework. This new component will now be part of the first release candidate of version 1.5.

You can grab a snapshot of the latest trunk code at the bottom left corner http://framework.zend.com/fisheye/browse/Zend_Framework/trunk/library where it says “Tarball”.

Then, have a look at the quickstart in the manual to see how to use it!

Posted by Rob on 19th February 2008 under News | No Comments »

WIl has recently posted to the fw-general mailing list that the final release of the 1.0 branch of the Zend Framework is currently planned for 22nd February 2008. This will be a useful set of bug fixes to the 1.0 branch enabling it to go out on a high note.

In the same announcement, Wil also said that the first release candidate for the next revision of Zend Framework (1.5RC1) is also planned for release the same day. 1.5RC1 will be a good version to download and start testing your applications against to find out what you will need to update in order to migrate to the final release of 1.5.

Posted by Rob on 14th February 2008 under News | No Comments »

If, like me, you’ve been wanting to change the error messages returned from Zend Framework validators then you’ll be pleased to hear that this is now supported in the latest SVN release. For more information read Matthew Weier O’Phinney’s announcement on the mailing list.

Posted by Nick on 8th February 2008 under News | 2 Comments »

Note that the online manual is for version 1.5PR, not 1.0.3. This is important as the new 1.5 features are now documented, but won’t work if you are using the 1.0.3 stable version of the Framework.

Also, as a side note, be aware that Zend_Loader is much slower in the 1.5PR release compared to 1.0.3, so don’t use it on a high traffic site! This issue has been fixed on the trunk (revision 7726), so if this issue is affecting you the give a snapshot a try and see if it solves it.

Posted by Rob on 31st January 2008 under News | No Comments »

Darby has just announced the availability of 1.5 Preview Release!

This is a great time to download it and check out the new features.

From Darby’s post, the main new features are:

• New Zend_Form component with support for AJAX-enabled form elements
• New action and view helpers for automating and facilitating AJAX requests and alternate response formats
• Infocard, OpenID, and LDAP authentication adapters
• Support for complex Lucene searches, including fuzzy, date-range, and wildcard queries
• Support for Lucene 2.1 index file format
• Partial, Placeholder, Action, and Header view helpers for advanced view composition and rendering
• New Zend_Layout component for automating and facilitating site layouts
• UTF-8 support for PDF documents
• New Technorati, SlideShare, and Remember the Milk web services

Also, many of the other components have been improved.

Posted by Rob on 29th January 2008 under News | 1 Comment »

Martin Hujer has prepared a Zend_Filter_StripNewlines proposal along with prototype code (and tests).

This is a very simple filter that does what it says on the tin: removes all new line characters from a string and resolves issue ZF-2427.

In general I’m all for a rich set of filters and validators as you never know what you are going to need for a given project.

Posted by Rob on 26th January 2008 under News | 2 Comments »

In a couple of recent posts, Wil Sinclair has outlined some changes related to the packaging and distribution of the Zend Framework for version 1.5.

Extras
Extras are components that are developed under the ZF community process (i.e. CLA, unit tested, documented, coding standards, etc.) but are not supported commercially by Zend Technologies. From Wil’s post on it:

The distinction between components chosen for core incubator and those chosen for extras incubator is simple: Zend will provide support for components in core- but not extras- while providing distribution for both core and extras on the main ZF site… …The strict guidelines for quality that we have enforced for core components, such as test code coverage and documentation, would also apply to components in extras.

I think that this is a good idea as the community will be able to provide components that Zend may not be interested in supporting, but are very useful. I expect various Zend_Service_ components to end up here and with any luck, Zend_Db_Adapter_Pdo_Odbc_Mssql!

Lean and Mean
In a separate post, Wil also indicated that version 1.5 of the Zend Framework will be distributed in two forms:

• “Lean and Mean”
• “Everything”

The “Lean and Mean” package will include just the core framework, excluding locale files.

The “Everything” package will contain everything(!) including unit tests, demos, locale files and the extras directory.

This should make the core download for ZF much smaller which is great for those of who don’t need the files in “Everything”.

All we need now is for someone to step up and make a PEAR channel for the Framework…

Posted by Rob on 26th January 2008 under News | 2 Comments »