PHP 4 officially died Friday. I started programming PHP with release candidates of 4.0.0 — which simultaneously introduced me to the GNU C compiler and toolset. My first official job using PHP was at a shop that was using PHP 3, and considering the costs of upgrading to PHP 4 — which clearly offerred many benefits over its predecessor. I switched to PHP 5 as soon as the first official release was made four years ago — the pains of reference handling with objects, the introduction of a unified constructor, first-class support for overloading, and SimpleXML won me over immediately, and I've never looked back. Goodbye, PHP 4; long live PHP!

I'm celebrating with the second release candidate of Zend Framework 1.6.0, which should drop today. There are a ton of new features available that I'm really excited about. I'm not going to go into implementation details here, but instead catalogue some of the larger and more interesting changes that are part of the release.

Dojo Integration

I've blogged a number of times about this, but a picture is worth a thousand words… or lines of code, in this matter. I'm going to show these as images, as I still need to determine how and where to get a public demo up, so bear with me. First:

What you're looking at is a form generated using Zend_Form (or, in this case, Zend_Dojo_Form). It contains four subforms, each represented by a tab. (I also created an additional decorator that creates the fifth tab.) The form elements are all Dijits, presenting a common look-and-feel, and have a variety of validators and features themselves.

The fifth tab shows off some fun features of Dojo: the ContentPane actually has no content, but was defined with an 'href' attribute pointing to a resource on the server. On this particular page, I define a dojo Grid that consumes an ItemFileReadStore — a fancy word for a remotable dojo.data resource. I used Zend_Dojo_Data to provide that, and the result is that, when you click on the tab, the following loads dynamically:

This stuff is ridiculously easy to pull off and create now — which means I no longer have any excuse for crappy looking forms or not adding ajax features to apps.

In experimenting with Dojo, I also discovered its build tools. Once your code is developed, it's a trivial task to tally up all your dojo.require statements, throw them in a build profile, and create a layer for use with your application. Doing so has tremendous performance and bandwidth benefits, and can mean the difference between a good application and a great one, in terms of user experience. I'll blog more on this later, but I'm excited that, because we're shipping a full source build of Dojo, this support will be delivered to ZF users out of the box.

Unit testing infrastructure

I've also blogged about this before. I've been using the Zend_Test_PHPUNit_ControllerTestCase on some personal projects as well as projects related to application examples I'm working on for some upcoming presentations.

There's nothing quite like having the assurance that your entire application — not just your models — works according to the expectations you've worked up, and that the document structure adheres to the design. This is going to become a must-have component for serious ZF developers.

Captcha Support

Captchas have become an essential tool in the anti-spam arsenal of most sites. While tools such as Akismet are fantastic, it's even better not to even need to send data to Akismet to process in the first place.

Stas worked up a nice design for captchas as we were finishing 1.5.0, but we didn't have time to complete it before shipping the release. This turned out to be fortuitous, as we have received community contributions of Figlet and ReCaptcha support since then. Zend_Captcha provides adapters for each of these, as well as for a GD-based image captcha. You can now pick and choose which works best for your site or altruistic leanings; using them in your forms is as simple as creating a Zend_Form element.

SOAP Support

Zend_Soap has been languishing in the incubator since before the 1.0 release. The WSDL autogeneration was mostly untested, and for several use cases, completely broken. Additionally, I had created but never completed testing and documenting Zend_Soap_Server, a thin wrapper on top of PHP's own SoapServer class.

Alex took Zend_Soap on as a project for 1.6.0, and has done tremendous things with it. He has even created a compatibility matrix that users can update to show how WSDL autodiscovery works with various SOAP clients — which will help us improve it in the future.

Form Improvements

There have been many feature requests and bugs filed against Zend_Form since its debut in 1.5.0, and I tried to address the most requested and critical of these for the release. There are several improvements that should make using Zend_Form easier and more flexible:

• Ability to set custom element or form errors. You can now specify the specific error message(s) to use if an element or form does not validate, as well as mark it as invalid. This is useful in particular when validating authentication; when authentication fails, you can mark the form invalid and specify a custom error message.

• Lazy-loading of filters, validators, and decorators. Previously, these were instantiated as soon as they were added to the element or form. Now the item metadata is simply stored; only when the item is retrieved is it instantiated. This offers some performance improvements in a number of areas: if you're not validating the form, the validators are not loaded; if you're not rendering the form, the decorators are not loaded. (One note: filters are almost invariably loaded, as they are used each time getValue() is called.)

  Another benefit of this change is that you can register plugin prefix paths any time before the plugin is actually retrieved. This should lead to less confusion and issues about event sequence, and provides additional flexibility to the component.

• Better array notation support. Several patches were provided by contributors, and I also re-worked the objects to do better name and id generation; the net result is seamless array notation for sub forms.

FireBug Support

The author of FirePHP, Christoph Dorn, has committed a new component to ZF, Zend_Wildfire. Wildfire is a project for standardizing communication channels between components; FirePHP is one implementation that communicates with the FireBug console for Firefox. The Zend_Wildfire component consists of a log writer, Zend_Log_Writer_Firebug, and a profiler, Zend_Db_Profiler_Firebug, which logs DB profiling information for use in FireBug. Together, these allow you to do more informed debugging in your browser, and can complement PHP debuggers such as XDebug and the Zend Debugger.

Pagination Support

Raise your hand if you've ever needed to provide paginated result sets for your data — good, I see a ton of virtual hands waving out there. Pagination is something that needs to be done frequently, usually needs to be tailored to your data and site, and is almost invariably a pain every single time. Zend_Paginator aims to make it simple.

Any iterable data set can be consumed by Zend_Paginator. You then need only specify what the current page number is and how many results per page to display — it works out the calculations, and, when used in conjunction with the paginationControl() helper, will even provide your pager for you. No more writing the algorithms by hand.

And then there was…

There are too many improvements and features really to count at this stage. We had originally intended this release to be smaller and offer fewer features, but as the time for release came closer, we discovered we had another monster on our hands. There is much to be excited about with this release — and still much, much more in the wings for future releases.

We are planning on tightening our release cycle so that we can offer more frequent and less intimidating releases in the future. Combine this with improvements we've been making to the proposal process, and you should be seeing more great things coming from the community — more frequently!

A huge thank you to all contributors, the Dojo team for answering my many questions, and my family for putting up with my long hours the last couple months. Happy developing!