I was recently approached by a representative from Packt Publishing to review their newst book on the Zend Framework, Zend Framework 1.8: Web Application Development by Keith Pope. The book is intended to be an introduction to the Zend Framework (ZF), and with the exception of chapters 4 and 5, I tend to agree. Chapters 4 and 5 do have their necessary place in the book, it’s just the nature of the content that leads them outside the realm of the introductory. The early chapters are a clear and concise introduction to the ZF and are even useful for the experienced ZF programmer offering a few tidbits and easier ways to do things in light of the 1.8 release. The later chapters are the most valuable for the experienced programmer and set a benchmark for the beginning programmer, showing them an example of how ZF is deployed in real world situations.

Anyone who has been following the Zend Framework and the speed at which they push out releases, may ask if this book will still be relevant. My answer to that questions is a definite yes. The 1.8 release was a milestone release for the ZF; currently at version 1.10, there haven’t been a number of signifcant changes since version 1.8. However, version 2.0 of the ZF will offer and number of changes and upgrades to a number of the core components. At that point, this book will need to be updated and improved, though just enough to get up to the 2.0 spec.

Before jumping into the review, you may want to check out the table of contents or a sample chapter.

The preface and first chapter of the book really highlight how easy it is to get a simple application up and running using the ZF. Within 3 pages of the first chapter, you’ve already got a functioning application (provided you’re following along with the examples). An important part of the first chapter, not only for programmers new to ZF but also those who are just new to the 1.8 release, is the new application configuration and the introduction of the Bootstrap classes. The way of bootstrapping applications changed pretty drastically in ZF 1.8 and you’ll see the important role is plays in development throughout chapters 1 – 4.

Chapter 2 covers all the basics of the ZF Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. You’ll probably need a little bit of background information about MVC architecture in order to get a full grasp of what’s going on here, but even without any knowledge of MVC, you should be able to continue following along. Really only the View and Controller ascpects are covered in any detail in Chapter 2. The Model aspect comes to light in chapter 3 and finds fruition in chapters 4 and 5. Chapters 4 and 5 start to delve outside of an introduction to the ZF and get into some of the more complex aspects of application development. In these chapters you start to see more of a picture of how Keith Pope builds a web application, which is understandable, an authors background is going to influence their writing. However I don’t think that the Service Layer pattern is strictly necessary for an introduction application development. I think that someone new to the ZF should probably re-read these chapters after reading the entire book and building at least one application. I think the importance of these chapters will come to light in retrospect.

Chapter 6 is a brief but very useful introduction to the Zend_Form component, which is arguably one of the more powerful aspects of the ZF when building web applications. While chapter 7 brings together the View aspect of the MVC showing the role that the forms play within views and really emphasising how ZF can speed up your application development. Chapters 8 and 9 cover some of the more complex parts of any web application: Authentication and Authorization. Authentication and authorization are two concepts that are often confused or conflated. Pope defines them very succintly by asking a couple simple questions to the requesting user. Authorization asks: “Can they do this?”, while Authentication asks: “Are they who they say they are?”. It’s important to keep these two concepts straight. The ZF’s concept of modules is introduced in chapter 10. Modules are a way for you to compartmentalize your application and can be reused between different applications. If your application is setup properly, modifications are only required to the application’s bootstrapping.

I found chapters 11 and 12 to be particularly useful, especially for the experienced ZF programmer. Chapter 11 covers the powerful caching that the ZF is capable of. ZF offers a number of different caching strategies, each suited to a particular purpose. Chapter 12 gets into the nitty gritty of testing. Testing is one of the most important aspects of web application development, especially when your application is live and used regularily. Pope gives a quick and handy introduction to PHPUnit (one of the most widely used testing frameworks for PHP) and then shows how ZF extends the functionality of PHPUnit. Ultimately at the end of chapter 12, you have all the tools necessary to test your entire application.

After getting through this book, you will have more than the tools necessary to build out a powerful web application using the Zend Framework. If you would like more information about the book or are interested in purachasing it, you can check it out on the Packt Publishing website