On the VG Tech blog today André Roaldseth has a new post showing how to lazy load in the Zend Framework bootstrap using two handy methods you can drop into your applications initialization.

The Bootstrapping process in Zend Framework isn’t perfect. You’ll often end up bootstrapping a lot of resources that you don’t need to complete the request. Depending on the resources this can be really expensive and hurt your overall performance. The worst kind are resources that open connections to external services [...], even worse, if the services are down they will end up blocking the execution.

Using his modified "getResource" and "lazyload" methods, he shows you how to modify your resource requests to put them in a temporary state that is only initialized when the resource is needed. You can find the code for this example in this gist.