The Master Zend Framework site has a new tutorial posted guiding you through the process of generating class factories the easy way with the help of the "FactoryCreator" tool in the Zend ServiceManager component.

If there’s one thing that’s always frustrated me when working with Zend Framework, it’s having to create factories for classes. Sure, it’s gotten easier as Zend ServiceManager’s continued to ever improve. And PhpStorm and Zend ServiceManager Grand Master, Gary Hockin, has given me a number of great tips and suggestions.

But it’s always been something I’ve felt frustrated by. Perhaps you feel the same. [...] But, what I’ve felt for some time is that they could also make it easier for us to follow these best practices too, such as with some tooling support. In the latest release of Zend ServiceManager, version 3.2.0, they have.

He goes on to talk about two tools that are included in this latest release: the ConfigDumper and FactoryCreator. He helps you get the FactoryCreator tool installed and provides a simple example of it in use, generating the factory for a "JournalService" class. He includes the results of the generation of the simple example before moving on to a more complicated example: a TableGateway object. The final example shows the generation of the factory for an "Actions" class, handling the controller processing for a simple MVC application. If you're a bit shorter on time, he's also created a screencast version of the tutorial you can view in-page or over on Vimeo.