Four days into the first preview of the Zend Framework and feedback is pouring in, further work is progressing, and another release is in the works. As you take your first steps of working with the Zend Framework, here are some of the first articles to help get you started.
Chris Shiflett’s “A Practical Tutorial”
Zend Framework contributor Chris Shiflett has written A Practical Tutorial starting with framework download and installation; and progressing through these aspects of the framework:
- Download and Installation
- The Zend static class
- Framework class loading
- Model/View/Controller using Zend_Controller_Front and Zend_View
- Input filtering with Zend_InputFilter
In the process, he builds a sample News Site application to put it altogether. Due to the newness of the framework database classes, he avoids the use of Zend_Db which would have given a more complete picture of another key area of the framework.
Rob Allen Explores the Controller and View Classes
In his first post, Rob Allen digs into the Zend_Controller_Front class and fills in where the docs were lacking. He covers the rewrite rules for funneling Apache requests to a bootstrap file, adding the controller to manage the flow of the web site, adds the ability to allow non-root directory locations, and ends up with a running sample.
As a follow-up, he later writes about combining the use of the controller with the Zend_View class to accomplish his goal of transparent view handling. Rob’s implementation involves more subclassing and fandangling than will likely be necessary as the framework progresses or as alternative methods are explored and best practices emerge.
PHP Wiki Covers the Zend Controller
An article on PHP Wiki steps through application setup, creating a bootstrap index.php, and creating a basic controller and view. This is a basic, but straight forward sample for using Zend_Controller_Front and Zend_View.
More to Life than MVC
The first articles to hit the web were specifically about the Model/View/Controller components of the framework. With the controller being the hub of control for a web application, and the model and view the main workhorses, they receive a lot of attention. Yet the framework contains so much more: database access, data objects, security via filtering and quoting, form handling, consuming XML feeds, HTTP protocol handling, AJAX with JSON, logging, email, PDF handling, consuming web and XML/RPC services, service wrappers for common Web 2.0 services, and a complete search engine for PHP!
As a non-MVC example, Davey Shafik shows a use of the framework Zend_Service_Flickr class to composite Flickr images on-the-fly.
...More examples and tutorials to come including our own Zend Developer Zone cookbook for building web applications using the Zend Framework.
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