During a code review last week, one of my clients mentioned that they were looking into alternatives to Zend_Form for their ZF1 application. They were looking for something that was easier to use than ZF1′s Zend_Form for their developers, and could easily be used with Twitter Bootstrap form markup without having to deal with decorators. Without giving it much thought, I suggested that it might be possible to take advantage of the new Zend\Form from ZF2, which would easily meet their needs, and there’s a ton of Twitter Bootstrap modules for ZF2 that easily make your forms Bootstrap-friendly.

This got me thinking… How difficult would it be to create a sort of compatibility layer enabling ZF1 applications to take advantage of ZF2 features and modules without refactoring the entire application for ZF2? Well, as it turns out, not very difficult. Allow me to introduce ZF 2-for-1.

Simply install ZF 2-for-1, and you can instantly use many of the great new ZF2 features right inside of your existing ZF1 applications. It’s even capable of loading ZF2 modules. Of course, not all ZF2 modules will “just work” with ZF1 using ZF 2-for-1, but some simple modules should work just fine. As ZF 2-for-1 improves, more and more modules will likely become compatible.

Fabien Potencier just wrote an interesting post where he outlines what he believes to be the selling points of the Symfony project. First, let me point out that all of his points are 100% valid, and there’s no doubt that Symfony is a great framework. I have great respect for Fabien and the Symfony project as a whole.

That said, my concern with Fabien’s post is that usually “selling points” for something imply that they are things that set something apart from the alternatives. Now, I’m sure Fabien had no ill-intentions when writing his post, but I do worry that some may misinterpret his post as a list of things that set Symfony apart from Zend Framework or other frameworks, which is simply not true.

Allow me to address each of Fabien’s points from Zend Framework’s perspective:

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This post will show you how to create a simple view helper in Zend Framework 2.

In this example, our view helper will simply return the full, absolute URL of the current page/request.

<?php
// ./module/Application/src/Application/View/Helper/AbsoluteUrl.php
namespace Application\View\Helper;
 
use Zend\Http\Request;
use Zend\View\Helper\AbstractHelper;
 
class AbsoluteUrl extends AbstractHelper
{
    protected $request;
 
    public function __construct(Request $request)
    {
        $this->request = $request;
    }
 
    public function __invoke()
    {
        return $this->request->getUri()->normalize();
    }
}

You’ll notice that this particular helper has a dependency — a Zend\Http\Request object. To inject this, we’ll need to set up a factory with the initialization logic for our view helper:

<?php
// ./module/Application/Module.php
namespace Application;
 
use Application\View\Helper\AbsoluteUrl;
 
class Module
{
    public function getViewHelperConfig()
    {
        return array(
            'factories' => array(
                // the array key here is the name you will call the view helper by in your view scripts
                'absoluteUrl' => function($sm) {
                    $locator = $sm->getServiceLocator(); // $sm is the view helper manager, so we need to fetch the main service manager
                    return new AbsoluteUrl($locator->get('Request'));
                },
            ),
        );
    }
 
     // If copy/pasting this example, you'll also need the getAutoloaderConfig() method; I've omitted it for the sake of brevity.
}

That’s it! Now you can call your helper in your view scripts:

The full URL to the current page is: <?php echo $this->absoluteUrl(); ?>

Note: I’ll be covering the details of the getViewHelperConfig() method and how ZF2 uses the ServiceManager to handle view helpers, controller plugins, etc in a later post.

So you’re all excited to try out ZF2. You clone the skeleton, install some modules, maybe even follow Rob Allen’s excellent ZF2 tutorial, and finally, start building your application. Now, if you’re a former ZF1 user or refugee from another framework, you might be troubled at this point by the fact that, at first glance, ZF2 doesn’t appear to take into consideration environment-specific configuration values (e.g., development, testing, staging, production). Luckily, this is not the case!

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