The Zend Developer Zone has posted a new tutorial (from Matthew Weier O'Phinney) about a handy feature of the Zend Framework's view layer - view helpers that can be added in and reused across an application to do some pretty cool stuff.

A View Helper is simply a class that follows particular naming conventions, When attached to a view object, you can call the helper as if it were a method of the view object itself. The View object retains helper instances, which means that they retain states between calls.

View helpers can be use to do things like manipulate view data for more complex operations and carrying over data between two views, limiting the number of fetches that have to be done. He shows how to create a simple helper - My_Helper_FooBar - that just appends "fooBar " to whatever's passed in. He also talks about some of the default view helpers (like form fields), partials, the doctype() helper, capturing/caching content to be used later and the use of placeholders.

On Cesarodas.com, Saddor as created a simple class to help with caching information in a PHP application - specifically when it comes to capturing output (like HTML generated for the page).

Usually we need to find a way to help php to reduce the number of query to a database, because as a friend told me: "Most of time php is awaiting for a database to response". And that is wasted resource (time, processor, main memory). The developer need to find a way to store some pages until it changes or something like that. There are many cache classes over there, but exist many problems, I will focus on two problems. Implementation and concurrence.

His gCache class uses capture/endcapture methods to define where the content starts and ends and, once the information is stored, checks with a valid method and echoes the content if it's been cached. An example of the class in action is also included.

In a new blog post today, Pierre-Alain Joye shows a method for doing a screen capture with just PHP and the GD functionality (an updated library, a DLL).

To get a snapshot of a HTML page, a window or a complete screen was always something tricky to do in PHP. For one of my current projects, I had to check that our changes did not affect visually any page. An easy way to achieve this goal is to compare the rendered pages in the browsers itself, easy and time consuming (for a human being :D).

That's why I finally sit down and implemented imagegrabscreen and imagegrabwindow . They capture respectively the whole screen or a window (using its handle).

He includes a few examples including grabbing a default screenshot, grabbing just the contents of a certain application (like Internet Explorer), and grabbing a fullscreened IE window too.