On the Developer Tutorials site there's a new tutorial providing an introduction to the popular PHP framework, the Zend Framework.

I find myself constantly bombarded with questions from students and co-workers I've introduced to the Zend Framework regarding how the different components can come together to form a basic application. I've searched, I have found, I have emailed great tutorials, but still the most common questions are posed "What's should I include in index.php?", "Should I use Zend_Db_Table?", "And what about Zend_Form?"

It gives the usual overview of setting up an application and how its all structured but it also includes a specific look at the Zend_Form, Zend_Db_Table, Zend_Registry and Zend_Cache components.

Rob Allen has posted a few notes about the Zend_Cache component of the Zend Framework to his blog today.

Recently I needed to speed up a legacy project that makes a lot of database calls to generate each page. After profiling, I discovered that 90% of the database calls returned data that rarely changed, so decided to cache these calls. One of the nice things about Zend_Framework is that its use-at-will philosophy means that you can use any given component with minimal dependencies on the rest of the framework code.

He shows how, using the Zend_Cache module (and friends Zend_Loader and Zend_Exception), he creates a caching class that can be called anywhere and is used to cache the results from the queries. His default lifetime is set to 7200 seconds - two hours - before the script needs to refresh the cache and get the latest updates.

Doug Brown has posted a new entry to his blog about how the Zend_Cache component of the Zend Framework has saved him some money.

He and his site were taken offline by his own hosting company because of one little detail - the limit on usage for the shared server was 3% and his site was using 30%. Going through his logs, he found the culprit - a "too many connections" message from MySQL due to the number of requests.

I'll admit, I was in a huge hurry to get this project done, so I wasn't thinking about the long term effects. Needless to say, I wasn't caching my MySQL query results. I know, tisk tisk.

He added a new private method to his class (using Zend_Cache to store the date) and dropped the call into his controller to pulled the cached info whenever it needed it.

In his current work with a project staring the Zend Framework, Nick Halstead has figured out a way to create a tag cloud that can be loaded quickly with the help of the Zend_Cache component.

Zend_Cache is a caching mechanism that either lets you cache chunks of output or chunks of data. Both concepts are easy to implement within your code and given time they become second nature to use. And because they are simple to implement you find yourself using them anywhere and everywhere.

In his example, he grabs treed category data and dumps it (formatted) into a Zend_Cache object. He also mentions what he calls a "touch of genius on the part of the Zend Framework team" - the ability to tag the cache and make it easy to reference.

Finally, it's back out to the front end, an interface to the cached object that pushes the data back out as a series of formatted links pointing to content associated with the chosen tag.

Matt Wade has posted a quick item to APress' Inside Open Source blog today mentioning an update to an item he'd previously mentioned - issues with the Zend_Cache module.

One of my complaints was the Zend_Cache did not accept lifetimes on a per object basis, but rather the lifetime was at an application level. I just received notice in my inbox that the issue has been fixed! The change is currently in svn, and should be in the 0.80 preview release. Thanks go to Fabien for the fix.

You can download this latest version of the Framework (0.7.0) from the Zend Framework website.

In this new entry on the APress "Inside Open Source" blog, Matt Wade shares some of his thoughts on one of the more popular PHP frameworks - the Zend Framework.

I've found that using the framework has significantly decreased my development time and really just given me cleaner, easier to maintain code. Of course, these are the goals of any framework. I do have a couple of issues I've come across and it is those I'd like to talk about.

The two issues he mentions were problems with the Zend_Db component (not everyone has just one primary key in their table) and caching problems with Zend_Cache (no unique lifetimes included).

The Zend Developer Zone has its next in its "Inside Look" series at the Zend Framework and its components - this look at the Zend_Cache component.

Caching isn't one of those things that many people think of when designing their first applications. However once they launch their new AJAX enabled web2.0 application, they might start wondering what they can do to get this beast to move faster. The answer is caching.

Aaron Wormus gets started with the basics - why use caching and some of what it's for - before getting into the actual code example. His simple example just shows how to cache a bit of information and get when it was cached. He also talks about implementing tagging for more complex caches (different pieces for different times), and the drivers that are available for the component - both frontend and backend.