The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast is back with a new episode - an interview with two well-known members of the Zend Framework community, Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Ralph Schindler. The recording was made at the Jump In! Camp that's currently being held by Microsoft.

They spend most of the time talking about dependency injection - defining what it is and some of the plans there are to integrate it into the Zend Framework (including where the dependencies are created and used).

As always, you can either listen to this latest show via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 for listening at your leisure. You can also subscribe to their feed to make it even easier to get this and future episodes.

Kevin Schroeder has posted the latest podcast of a session from the Zend/PHP Conference 2010 as recorded at the conference at the end of 2010 in Santa Clara, CA. This new recording is a session from Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Ralph Schindler introducing what will be new in the 2.0 version of the Zend Framework.

Zend Framework has grown tremendously since the first public preview release in March 2006. Originally a slim, MVC framework with a number of standalone components, it has grown to a codebase more than 2M lines of code. Work now turns to version 2, with goals of increased simplicity and advanced PHP 5.3 usage.

You can either listen via the in-page player or you can download the mp3 directly. You can also see the slides for the presentation over on Slideshare.

Cal Evans has a new post today looking at a recent release coming out of the Zend Framework project - a namespace converter to take the standardized naming schemes and convert them into PHP 5.3 namespaces on the fly.

Ralph works on a lost of stuff but my favorite is Zend_Tool. Every time Ralph releases a new version of Zend_Tool, he and I end up having an extended debugging session making sure that my zf twitter client still works. The other day however Ralph released something new. He announced that he had written a tool to take a library using the Zend (and PEAR?) standard for class naming – My_Class_Name is actually MyClassName.php – and convert them to PHP 5.3 namespaces.

Cal includes some sample code of this new tool in action on a section of the Zend Framework's ACL code. The output is automatically pushed out to an output directory based on rules defined either in an XML file or from the command-line when it's called. There's also a snippet with the command-line options for reference.

There's an announcement over on the Zend Developer Zone today about the posting of a recorded webinar that Zend had concerning some of the latest updates to the Zend Framework - Zend_Layout and Zend_View enhancements.

The problem of maintaining a consistent look and feel while encouraging best practices is what Zend_Layout, as well as the Zend Framework 1.5 Zend_View enhancements, attempt to solve.

The recording (and accompanying slides) cover the updates made to these two components and how they help the goal of uniformity and give a "two-step" solution to make it happen. The presenter for the webinar was Ralph Schindler.