Matthew Weier O'Phinney has made some updates to his pastebin example showing the combination of the Zend Framework and Dojo libraries.

I've been getting a lot of interest in my Pastebin demo app -- partly by those wanting to play with Dojo+ZF, partly by those just interested in the application. [...] I've created a Github repository so you can track the latest developments, as well as pull custom tarballs.

The demo application was a part of Matthew's Zend Framework & Dojo webinar from Zend.

Zend made several announcements in the opening keynote of this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo including collaborations with Adobe, IBM and the Dojo project to further PHP's place in the online development community.

These announcements pertained to partnerships with these other companies on projects like bringing out-of-the-box Ajax functionality to the Zend Framework with Dojo and updates to the Zend Core and Zend Studio software. Also announced was the release of a new certification specifically for the Zend Framework - "Zend Certified Engineer for Zend Framework".

One of the major announcements, though, was Zend's efforts with Adobe to help make the connection between their powerful Flex environment and what PHP has to offer. The key to the integration lies in the AMFPHP (Action Message Format) tool that acts as a layer letting Flex and PHP talk. Zend and Adobe will also be, from this point on, creating links between the Zend Studio software and the Adobe Flex Builder software to help developers to help make the integration that much simpler.

You can find out more about their efforts on the Zend Framework website and the Adobe Flex pages on Adobe's developer website.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has posted an update on two things to his blog - that he will be speaking at this year's ZendCon and that new things have been posted from his Zend Framework & Dojo webinar the other day.

First off, you may now view my Dojo Webinar online (requires login and registration at zend.com). Attendance was phenomenal, and I've had some really good feedback. [...] Second, I've completed what I'm calling version 1.0.0 of the pastebin application I demo'd in the webinar. The PHP code is fully unit tested (though I haven't yet delved into using DOH! to test the JS), and incorporates a number of best practices and tips that Pete Higgins from Dojo was kind enough to provide to me.

This application can be downloaded directly from his site, ready to drop in and test with your local Zend Framework install.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has another post full of Dojo/Zend Framework goodness today - this time he looks at making proper layer files by combining the two.

During my Dojo and ZF webinar on Wednesday, Pete Higgins of Dojo fame noted that I could do something different and better on one of my slides. This particular item had to do with how I was consuming custom Dojo build layers within my code. I contacted him afterwards to find out what he suggested, and did a little playing of my own, and discovered some more Dojo and javascript beauty in the process.

The improvement replaced the need for a manual commenting/uncommenting of an addLayer call with a bit of namespaced layers that, based on the environment, adds a dependency for the right file. One less manual process, one less thing to go wrong on deployment.

With the recent release of the 1.6 version of the Zend Framework, Andi Gutmans has posted some thoughts and highlights of features in the new version.

The Zend Framework Community has delivered another feature-rich release of Zend Framework and I'm extremely proud and happy to see the energy and excitement around this project. The ZF team (Wil Sinclair, Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Ralph Schindler, Alexander Veremyev) along with many others in the ZF community and at Zend, have been doing a superb job and have been working very hard to put this release together.

He mentions the Dojo integration, the updates to the SOAP component, updates to make test-driven development simpler and a reminder about ZendCon08 coming soon that will feature several Zend Framework-centric talks.

The IBM developerWorks website has a new tutorial for those looking to get into the powerful combination of Ajax and PHP - an introduction to creating Ajax-based websites with PHP.

Learn the process of writing Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) applications using native JavaScript code and PHP. This article introduces a few different frameworks and application program interfaces (APIs) that reduce the amount of code you need to write to achieve a complete Ajax-based Web application.

They (briefly) explain what Ajax is and the benefits of it before jumping right in to a sample page. They go for the "manual first" approach so developers know to make basic connections with the XMLHttpRequest object and handle the responses. They do mention some of the libraries offered that help with the connections too (like jQuery, Prototype and Dojo).

On his blog today Matthew Weier O'Phinney has pointed out a webinar that he'll be giving (for Zend) on the recent popular introduction into the Zend Framework - the Zend Framework and Dojo.

I'm particularly excited about this webinar, as I've been developing a sample pastebin application to show off a number of features; the webinar will feature some screencasts showing the new code in action, and promises to be much more dynamic than my typical "bullet point and code" presentations.

Be sure to register before hand to get your spot in what will undoubtedly be a popular event.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has posted a tutorial to his blog that shows how to implement the dijit.Editor (a dijit helper that didn't make it into the current release of the Zend Framework).

We're getting ready to release Zend Framework 1.6.0. However, one important Dijit had to be omitted from the release as I was not able to get it working in time: dijit.Editor.

This dijit is important as it provides an out-of-the-box WYSIWYG editor that you can use with your forms. Unfortunately, actually using it with forms is pretty tricky -- Dojo actually ends up storing content outside the form, which means you need to create a handler that pulls the content into a hidden element when saving.

He includes the code for a sample view helper to implement it and how to include it into your Zend_Form via an addElement call.

In this new post to his blog today, Matthew Weier O'Phinney mentions the death of PHP4 and (the main focus) gives a preview of what's to come in the next version of the Zend Framework (1.6.0).

I'm celebrating [the death of PHP4] 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.

He mentions the Dojo integration, updates to the unit testing infrastructure, captcha support in the Zend_Form component, Firebug support and included pagination functionality. You can grab this preview release from the downloads page on the Zend Framework website.

According to this new post on the Zend Developer Zone (from Wil Sinclair) the latest Release Candidate for the upcoming Zend Framework 1.6 release has been posted - Release Candidate 1.

We couldn't be happier to announce that Zend Framework 1.6 Release Candidate 1 is now available from the Zend Framework download site!

New features include the major Dojo integration, SOAP components and updates to the functionality for unit testing, session handling, pagination, character sets and much more. Check out the full list in the Zend Developer Zone post.