Michelangelo van Dam has a new post to his blog today looking a a method for doing some context switching in his Zend Framework application to use jQuery in his app's static HTML output.

I had already build my apps using static HTML output generated by Zend Framework, so how could I add this richness to my apps without refactoring most of my code ? Simple, by using Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ContextSwitch, ZendX_JQuery and some minor adjustments to my view scripts.

He includes some code (that's confirmed to work with ZF 1.10.3) using the contextSwitch method on a helper object that adds in the "json" type for the contexts that can be used for the responses. Then a new template is added for the type (like index.json.phtml for the json output). Make a change or two to your bootstrap file to add in the right jQuery helpers and your view is as simple as calling "$this->jQuery".