Aaron Wormus is back today on the Zend Developer Zone with another in his "Hidden Gems" series. This time, he takes a look at the "Zend Plumbing", those bits of connective code that help you make your Zend Framework applications work.

The functionality that he covers in this article are some of the min parts that a lot of ZF coders use every day and might not know it:

• the Zend class (providing a suite of helper methods)
• built in Wrapper functions:
  • loadFile
  • loadClass
  • loadInterface
  • isReadable
  • dump
  • exception
• the Zend registry

Each of these is briefly described with some sample code for the loadFile, loadClass, exceptions and the Registry to give you an idea of how to use it all. As always, you can check out the Zend Framework website for all the details on each of these functionality bits.