With the recent release of the 1.6 version of the Zend Framework, Andi Gutmans has posted some thoughts and highlights of features in the new version.

The Zend Framework Community has delivered another feature-rich release of Zend Framework and I'm extremely proud and happy to see the energy and excitement around this project. The ZF team (Wil Sinclair, Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Ralph Schindler, Alexander Veremyev) along with many others in the ZF community and at Zend, have been doing a superb job and have been working very hard to put this release together.

He mentions the Dojo integration, the updates to the SOAP component, updates to make test-driven development simpler and a reminder about ZendCon08 coming soon that will feature several Zend Framework-centric talks.

The IBM developerWorks website has a new tutorial for those looking to get into the powerful combination of Ajax and PHP - an introduction to creating Ajax-based websites with PHP.

Learn the process of writing Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) applications using native JavaScript code and PHP. This article introduces a few different frameworks and application program interfaces (APIs) that reduce the amount of code you need to write to achieve a complete Ajax-based Web application.

They (briefly) explain what Ajax is and the benefits of it before jumping right in to a sample page. They go for the "manual first" approach so developers know to make basic connections with the XMLHttpRequest object and handle the responses. They do mention some of the libraries offered that help with the connections too (like jQuery, Prototype and Dojo).

On his blog today Matthew Weier O'Phinney has pointed out a webinar that he'll be giving (for Zend) on the recent popular introduction into the Zend Framework - the Zend Framework and Dojo.

I'm particularly excited about this webinar, as I've been developing a sample pastebin application to show off a number of features; the webinar will feature some screencasts showing the new code in action, and promises to be much more dynamic than my typical "bullet point and code" presentations.

Be sure to register before hand to get your spot in what will undoubtedly be a popular event.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has posted a tutorial to his blog that shows how to implement the dijit.Editor (a dijit helper that didn't make it into the current release of the Zend Framework).

We're getting ready to release Zend Framework 1.6.0. However, one important Dijit had to be omitted from the release as I was not able to get it working in time: dijit.Editor.

This dijit is important as it provides an out-of-the-box WYSIWYG editor that you can use with your forms. Unfortunately, actually using it with forms is pretty tricky -- Dojo actually ends up storing content outside the form, which means you need to create a handler that pulls the content into a hidden element when saving.

He includes the code for a sample view helper to implement it and how to include it into your Zend_Form via an addElement call.

In this new post to his blog today, Matthew Weier O'Phinney mentions the death of PHP4 and (the main focus) gives a preview of what's to come in the next version of the Zend Framework (1.6.0).

I'm celebrating [the death of PHP4] with the second release candidate of Zend Framework 1.6.0, which should drop today. There are a ton of new features available that I'm really excited about. I'm not going to go into implementation details here, but instead catalogue some of the larger and more interesting changes that are part of the release.

He mentions the Dojo integration, updates to the unit testing infrastructure, captcha support in the Zend_Form component, Firebug support and included pagination functionality. You can grab this preview release from the downloads page on the Zend Framework website.

According to this new post on the Zend Developer Zone (from Wil Sinclair) the latest Release Candidate for the upcoming Zend Framework 1.6 release has been posted - Release Candidate 1.

We couldn't be happier to announce that Zend Framework 1.6 Release Candidate 1 is now available from the Zend Framework download site!

New features include the major Dojo integration, SOAP components and updates to the functionality for unit testing, session handling, pagination, character sets and much more. Check out the full list in the Zend Developer Zone post.

The Zend Developer Zone has reminder posted about some of the upcoming webinars brought to you from Zend on a wide range of topics:

• What's New in Zend Framework 1.6?
• Continuous Integration with PHPUnderControl Part 1
• Continuous Integration with PHPUnderControl Part 2
• Zend Framework and Dojo Integration

If you're on Twitter and would like to keep up with the upcoming webinars, just follow webinarsatzend.

If you weren't able to make it to yesterday's webinar from Zend and the Dojo group about their partnership, Matthew Weier O'Phinney is ready to hook you up with all of the details they presented.

We had our Zend Framework/Dojo integration QA today. Aside from some connectivity issues at the beginning of the presentation, things went smoothly, and there were some good questions.

He's made the slides both available for download directly and as a slideshow on Slideshare. He doesn't mention when the recording of the webinar will be out, but it shouldn't be too far off.

Zend will be hosting a webinar this morning for all those interesting in hearing about the new partnership between them and the Dojo framework to bring fully-developed javascript functionality to the Zend Framework.

Zend is excited to announce a partnership between Dojo and Zend Framework. The goal is to deliver a one-stop solution for building rich internet applications with PHP & Ajax. Zend's co-founder and chief technical officer Andi Gutmans discusses this announcement in-depth on his blog and Zend architect Matthew Weier O'Phinney also provides code samples and more details in a separate post.

The webinar will provide an overview of the integration that's going to happen and a bit of Q&A from those listening in. The event will be happening at 9am PDT/4pm GMT and you'll need to register to save your spot and get in.

In his keynote this morning Andi Gutmans announced some other big news (see here for the other announcement) at the php|tek conference currently being held in Chicago - that Zend and the Dojo framework were teaming up to provide an "out-of-the-box" Ajax solution included with the Zend Framework.

Several members of the community have already blogged about it including:

• Matthew Weier O'Phinney
• Andi himself
• Wolfram Kriesing
• this FAQ from the Zend Developer Zone detailing the partnership

So far, all of the comments have been good and the partnership has been well received. Matthew included in hist post a few of the places they're already planning on "ajaxing" in the Zend Framework (including the forms and the JSON-RPC server).