The Zend Developer Zone has a quick post from albeva about an extension from the default controller in the Zend Framework to map URL parameters directly to the methods.

This not only makes parameter passing intuitive (rather than calling $this->_request->getParam() ) but also automatically uses the default value if provided and if typehinting is provided either via phpdoc comment or before the parameter (array or classname) it will do the required instantiation or type casting.

The post includes a snippet of sample code, but you can learn more about the script here.