OStatic

Many Improvements in Zend Framework 1.6

The Zend Framework, a popular open-source Web application framework sponsored by PHP company Zend, just released version 1.6, and it contains a large number of new features. So writes Zend co-founder Andi Gutmans on his blog last week, on the occasion of the release being made available. The most important features associated with this release are the integration of the Dojo framework for JavaScript, better support for automatic testing, and better support for SOAP.

Zend Framework uses the MVC (model-view-controller) paradigm for Web application development, as do Ruby on Rails and Django, as well a some other PHP projects, such as CakePHP. Much like Rails applications, Zend Framework apps have separate directories for models, views, and controllers. It also includes its own system for access control and permissions, support for authenticating against LDAP and OpenID, caching, and plugins.

In his blog posting, Gutmans writes about several of the elements of Zend Framework that were added and updated to the 1.6 release:

• Pagination: The new Zend_Paginator object makes it possible to retrieve a subset of rows from a large query, allowing for speedups in both time and memory.
• ReCaptcha support: Many Web users are familiar with "captchas," the messed-up letters that are relatively easy for people to identify, but hard for computers to decipher, used to add security and reduce spam. The "ReCaptcha" project replaces these with scanned words from actual books, whose digitization requires human intervention. Zend Framework now includes support for ReCaptcha, allowing sites to benefit from reduced spam, while helping to digitize old books.
• View helpers for multimedia documents: While it has always been possible to embed Flash and QuickTime documents in a Zend Framework application, there are now specialized helpers that make it easier and faster to do so.
• Dojo integration: As I wrote above, this version of Zend Framework integrates the Dojo JavaScript framework. Dojo and Zend had already agreed back in May to work together; while Ruby on Rails has standardized on Prototype, both Django and Zend Framework have chosen Dojo. Dojo provides a wealth of components and functionality, similar in many ways to Yahoo's YUI JavaScript library. It will now be easier to make use of Ajax from within your application, with standard Zend helpers and functions that take work with Dojo directly and automatically.

• ruby on rails
• Dojo
• php
• django
• zend framework
• soap

Share Your Comments