The second 1.6 Release Candidate was published earlier this day and - wow - we’re going to get a lot of new stuff to play with. Or like Matthew put it:

There are a ton of new features available that I’m really excited about.

Word! Not only that the Zend Framework is getting more mature with every release, it’s growing unbelievably fast. I didn’t expected such a fast evolution when I started evaluating it (I guess it was version 0.92 back then).

When it comes to Javascript I’m using the Prototype/script.aculo.us combination because I already know it from RoR but I skipped through the Zend_Dojo docs and Matthew wrote a bit about the Dojo integration and I have to admit: the new Zend_Dojo stuff looks promising! I’m really thinking about dropping Prototype/script.aculo.us in favor of Dojo. I’ll write a report as soon as my evaluation process brought out some perceptions.

Next new big thing is of course Zend_Soap. It is mandatory for a modern web framework to have a SOAP component. Even though none of my active projects is using SOAP in any way (REST is all over the place nowadays), the availability of Zend_Soap let me sleep a bit better. There is a feature called Zend_Soap_Autodiscover which looks interesting. I’ll dig into that later that week, hadn’t had the time yet to do so.

Thomas finished his Zend_File_Transfer component. I already tested the component out of the trunk. I’m extensively using Zend_Form in some of my applications and this was the last piece which I really missed regularly when I worked with forms.

Besides my top 3 there are of course many other new components like Zend_Paginator (I didn’t test the component yet, but it looks helpful), Zend_Test_PHPUnit with which you can test the MVC part of your applications (I already used an earlier version from SVN, it’s very easy to work with) and Zend_Text_Figlet which is … interesting.

A big Thank You to all Zend Framework Contributors out there in the world. I seriously never enjoyed it more to develop PHP applications!

An overview of new features:

* Dojo Integration
- JSON-RPC Server
- dojo.data Envelopes
- Dojo View Helper
- Dijit integration with Zend_Form & Zend_View
- Dojo Library Distribution
* SOAP
- SOAP Server
- SOAP Client
- Autodiscovery
- WSDL access
- WSDL Generation
* Preview of Tooling Project in Laboratory (see /laboratory folder)
- Command Line Interface
- Project Asset Management
* Unit Testing Harness for Controllers
* Lucene 2.3 Index File Format Support
* Zend_Session save handler for Database Tables
* Paginator Component
* Text/Figlet Support
* ReCaptcha Service
* Captcha Form Element
* Zend_Config_Xml Attribute Support
* Zend_File_Transfer Component
* File Upload Form Element
* Zend_Wildfire Component with FireBug Log Writer
* Media View Helpers (Flash, Quicktime, Object, and Page)
* Support in Zend_Translate for INI File Format

Tags: PHP, Zend Framework

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Zend Framework. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.