In a new post to the techFounder blog today, Eran Galperin shares a tool that he's created to make life outside of the Zend Framework simpler. It's a simple script that, when they're needed, grabs the Zend Framework libraries from the remote SVN and drops them in place.

Reusing Zend Framework based code can be a bit of a pain - you do not want to include the entire framework just for a few classes, yet tracking down the dependencies needed to run your code can be time consuming and it's hard to tell if you aren't missing anything. To overcome those issues, I wrote a utility class to automatically resolve Zend Framework dependencies by fetching them from the online SVN repository when they are needed (and then storing them locally).

You can grab the tool from his Binpress account (under the MIT license). He also gets into some of the details on how the script works - how it uses an autoload to catch all of the class loading, checks for the file locally and if it's not there, grabs the remote. If there's dependencies for that, they're fetched as well. There's also an example of its usage (written out, not code, but you get the idea).