As I write this, ZendCon begins in less than a week. I have the honor and pleasure to be speaking there again, for the sixth year running.

I had a twitter/IRC exchange yesterday with Andries Seutens and Nick Belhomme regarding applications that include widgets within their layout. During the exchange, I told Andriess not to use the action() view helper, and both Andriess and Nick then asked how to implement widgets if they shouldn't use that helper. While I ended up having an IRC exchange with Nick to give him a general idea on how to accomplish the task, I decided a longer writeup was in order.

During the past week, I've been looking at different strategies for autoloading in Zend Framework. I've suspected for some time that our class loading strategy might be one source of performance degradation, and wanted to research some different approaches, and compare performance.

In this post, I'll outline the approaches I've tried, the benchmarking stategy I applied, and the results of benchmarking each approach.

When I was at Symfony Live this past February, I assisted Stefan Koopmanschap in a full-day workshop on integrating Zend Framework in Symfony applications. During that workshop, Stefan demonstrated creating Symfony "tasks". These are classes that tie in to the Symfony command-line tooling -- basically allowing you to tie in to the CLI tool in order to create cronjobs, migration scripts, etc.

Of course, Zend Framework has an analogue to Symfony tasks in the Zend_Tool component's "providers". In this post, I'll demonstrate how you can create a simple provider that will return the most recent entry from an RSS or Atom feed.

The past few months have kept myself and my team quite busy, as we've turned our attentions from maintenance of the Zend Framework 1.X series to Zend Framework 2.0. I've been fielding questions regularly about ZF2 lately, and felt it was time to talk about the roadmap for ZF2, what we've done so far, and how the community can help.

I've been hearing about and reading about Gearman for a couple years now, but, due to the nature of my work, it's never really been something I needed to investigate; when you're writing backend code, scalability is something you leave to the end-users, right?

Wrong! But perhaps an explanation is in order.

For the third year running, I'm pleased to be speaking at the Dutch PHP Conference, held again in Amsterdam this coming 10-12 of June.

For the past month, I've been immersed in PHP 5.3 as I and my team have started work on Zend Framework 2.0. PHP 5.3 offers a slew of new language features, many of which were developed to assist framework and library developers. Most of the time, these features are straight-forward, and you can simply use them; in other cases, however, we've run into behaviors that were unexpected. This post will detail several of these, so you either don't run into the same issues -- or can capitalize on some of our discoveries.

Brandon Savage approached me with an interesting issue regarding ZF bootstrap resources, and accessing them in your action controllers. Basically, he'd like to see any resource initialized by the bootstrap immediately available as simply a public member of his action controller.

So, for instance, if you were using the "DB" resource in your application, your controller could access it via $this->db.

I see a number of questions regularly about module bootstraps in Zend Framework, and decided it was time to write a post about them finally.

In Zend Framework 1.8.0, we added Zend_Application, which is intended to (a) formalize the bootstrapping process, and (b) make it re-usable. One aspect of it was to allow bootstrapping of individual application modules -- which are discrete collections of controllers, views, and models.

The most common question I get regarding module bootstraps is:

Why are all module bootstraps run on every request, and not just the one for the requested module?

To answer that question, first I need to provide some background.