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!
Since the only way to know about this is a single link on the right hand side of the main book page I thought I’d point out that the book has its own forum which is intended for the discussion of the book; mistakes we’ve made, things that aren’t clear, things you like, etc.
We are interested in all feedback and do make changes or additions according to your comments, although a side effect of Rob’s working on the popular, day-to-day topics that make up the first half of the book, has been that he faces the bulk of the questions (including from me!) so I’m a little nervous that bringing more attention to the forum is going to increase his workload. So, erh, sorry in advance if that happens Rob! Hopefully the next early access release should begin to balance that out a bit.
Cal Evans is reporting on DevZone that Zend Framework has won a “Jolt Productivity Award”.
Well done to the team and all the contributors.
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.
I gave a short presentation at the PHP London Conference on Friday. The session was a three way head-to-head between Zend Framework, Symfony and CodeIgniter. It went quite well, even though I was very nervous and I think we covered the important points of the frameworks.
I’ve also uploaded the slides for my Zend Framework overview in case anyone is interested enough to want to look at them!
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:
Both releases are available at http://framework.zend.com/download.
Along with the resolution of this view helper bug concerning view helpers not being doctype aware, comes a small gotcha if you are relying on setting your doctype in layouts like so:
echo $this->doctype('XHTML1_STRICT');
The problem is that view helpers will not be aware of this setting and will revert to the default setting HTML4_LOOSE. To avoid this be sure to set the doctype earlier in the bootstrap process, something like so:
$viewRenderer->view->doctype('XHTML1_STRICT');
The Register’s Developer section has a new article up about using Zend Framework to connect to an Oracle database using the MVC components. In the article, Deepak Vohra looks at creating a simple MVC application that creates a simple CRUD application using the Oracle Zend_Db adapter.
I’ve just posted a very simple example of how to use Zend_Form over on akrabat.com.
Once you’ve read it and seen the power of Zend_Form, the manual provides much more detail on all the elements available and how to use them.
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!
