Zend Framework 1.8 is almost ready and as such, it’s time for me to look into what it’s got.

There’s a good listing of what’s new over here and really on the surface it doesn’t look like much. But as a person who’s been using ZF for quite some time, I’m really happy to see some integrated tools for creating the application structure in a quick and easy way. As long as module creation support makes it in for 1.8, things will be great.

Aside from that, I’ll be interested in seeing what Zend_Navigation has to offer.  Seeing as I’ve had numerous instances with global navigation, crumbs, module based navigation and I’ve had to create something each time – a single one-stop-shop for nav items could prove to be very useful.

Here’s lookin’ to the future.

Update: Zend Framework 1.8 is officially released.

Zend released version 1.6 of their framework just a short while ago and I’ve been reviewing a lot of the changes.  As it turns out this framework is becoming quite large and diverse in what it can do.  Some of the newer features that interest me:

• Saving sessions to a database table.
• Dojo integration
• Captcha and File upload form elements.

The saving sessions to a database table is conveniently easy, but I’m not too sure how well it will fare once I really get going.  It’s so simple that I’m not sure how well it’ll handle validating and securing sessions (based on Users IP, or web browser agent).  But we’ll see.

Dojo integration doesn’t really excite me that much. I’m a big fan of Prototype and Scriptaculous, and having another Javascript framework just sitting there seems like a waste of space to me – but again, it’s something I haven’t exactly dove into yet.  Maybe dojo rocks my socks and I just haven’t felt it yet.

And finally, the captcha and file uploaders may seem very trivial, but trust me – when you’re trying to build a site and those two elements were unavailable for use with Zend_Form — it was a big pain in the ass and effectively made Zend_Form useless when you needed those two elements.

Things are looking good, and the new source base for pileofcrap.org is getting there.  Of course every time I go to work on it I get distracted and then when I return to working on it a new version of ZF is out. Go figure!