Zend Framework 1 has been a popular open source PHP framework since it was introduced a few years ago. It’s successor, Zend Framework 2, was released in September of last year. The team behind it have now released a major update.
The Zend Framework community announced Wednesday that Zend Framework 2.0.7 and 2.1.0 are now available for download. Version 2.0.7 will be the last scheduled release in the 2.0 series, and only contains a number of bugfixes. You can check out the bugfix list here.
The release of version 2.1.0 is a much larger deal, and features a number of new improvements and additions that make the software more powerful. Here’s the major changes:
New Zend\Permissions\Rbac component, providing Role-Based Authorization Controls. These complement our existing Zend\Permissions\Acl component, providing another mechanism for providing authorization for your applications. We have Kyle Spraggs to thank for this addition.
New Zend\Test component, providing the ability to perform functional or integration testing on your ZF2 applications, courtesy of Blanchon Vincent.
Support for Oracle and IBM DB2 databases in Zend\Db. Many thanks to Ralph Schindler for spearheading these efforts.
A new Zend\Stdlib\StringUtils class to provide unified functionality around manipulating strings, particularly those in multibyte character sets. Thanks to Marc Bennewitz!
Scrypt support for Zend\Crypt. Thanks go to Enrico Zimuel for this addition.
Apache htpassword support in Zend\Crypt and in the HTTP authentication adapter; thanks go to Enrico Zimuel again!
New integration for handling and manipulating file uploads with the InputFilter, Form, and Mvc components, including capablities around the PRG pattern. Please thank Chris Martin for his huge amount of work around this!
A new render.error event, allowing you to fail gracefully in the event of a view rendering error. This allows you to present a static error page in such situations, as well as to log the problem. Thanks go to radnan for this addition.
Additional integration between a variety of plugin managers and the service manager was created, covering form elements, filters, validators, route classes, and serializers; this allows application-level configuration of these plugin managers, providing a simplified interface for configuring custom plugins.
Martin Meredith provided seven new traits for end-user use in PHP 5.4 applications.
The Authentication component received support for storage chains and validators.
Better console support, including better help messages, increased capabilities around colorisation, and more.
Many incremental improvements in Zend\Db; in particular, addition of profiling support, cross-table select join support, derived table in select join, and literal objects.
Zend\Logger has new FirePHP, ChromePHP, MongoDB, and FingersCrossed writers; thanks go to Walter Tamboer, Jeremy Mikola, and Stefan Kleff.
The MVC layer sports more flexibility and capabilities in the AbstractRestfulController, including automated content-negotiation for JSON requests, and support for most HTTP methods, including OPTIONS and HEAD (and the ability to support arbitrary HTTP methods).
Zend\Session now has a MongoDB save handler, and provides better interoperability between sessions managed by ZF2 and 3rd party code.
Zend Framework 2.1.0 features two new components as well:
ZendService_Apple_Apns, which provides push notification capabilities for Apple iOS. This component may be installed via Composer or Pyrus.
ZendService_Google_Gcm, which provides push notification capabilities for Google Android. This component may be installed via Composer or Pyrus.
Finally, there is now tooling support for the framework in the form of zftool.phar. Those who use it can expect the following features, with more being added in the future:
Skeleton application creation
Module creation within a skeleton
Autoloader classmap creation
ZF2 installation to a directory
You can grab Zend Framework 2.0.7 and 2.1.0 here. While you’re at it, you should check out Zend Framework 2 on github.
