Zend Framework in Action

Zend Framework 1.5 has been officially released to the world and Zend have updated the website to make it easier to find what you are looking for.

There have been loads of improvements to the framework, my favourites being ZendForm and ZendLayout. Other areas which received a lot of attention include OpenId and LDAP authentication, Lucene and PDF improvements, along with the new ContextSwitch helper to make writing Ajax and REST applications easier.

A new Quickstart guide has been written to get you going or you can look at my Zend Framework 1.5 tutorial if you prefer PDF or a different style of writing.

New today too is a series of getting started videos by Mitchell Hashimoto to show you get you up an running with the Framework. There are four videos so far, each one around 10 minutes long which cover installing, bootstrapping, controllers and view, and extending your ZF application. Check them out!

With the 1.5 release, Zend Framework has really come of age.

Posted by Rob on 17th March 2008 under News | 2 Comments »

The third release candidate of Zend Framework version 1.5 is now available for download. This release is shaping up nicely now and this release is nicely stable.

Officially, it’s not yet ready for production release, but you should be checking it out now ready to understand what changes will be needed to your sites when migrating. Fortunately, the documentation has a very useful chapter on migrating from 1.0.x to 1.5.0 which is a must read!

Posted by Rob on 13th March 2008 under News | 1 Comment »

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 | Comments Off

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 | Comments Off

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 | Comments Off

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 | Comments Off

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 | Comments Off

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 »