New today on ZendCasts.com there's a screencast tutorial about using phar archives in your applications.

Phar is a new thing that's developed on the horizon over the last few years that's essentially a PHP archive or library.

He shows how to set up a basic application (non-Zend Framework) that does a "hello world" sort of output showing a date "next week". Also included are the commands to bundle it up into a phar archive using the features already built into PHP. The build stub uses the buildFromDirectory and compression/buffering. He also points out a common problem with the default settings on many PHP installed - an INI setting that disables phar creation. Thankfully, it's easy to change via a ini_set call updating the "phar.readonly" setting.

New from ZendCasts.com there's a webcast about testing models in your Zend Framework applications.

A walkthrough on how to build up a simple model layer using a test-driven development approach.

You'll need a project already set up to follow along (he doesn't walk you through the creation of one or the setup of PHPUnit) but the process is pretty simple. He shows how to create some unit tests with the TDD method to help create better code through anticipated feature testing.

New from ZendCasts.com today there's a new screencast taking their integration of jQuery with the Zend Framework to the next level - creating an autocomplete control.

In the last video, I discussed ZendX_JQuery integration. Now we’re going to take it a step further by developing our own jQuery autocomplete control, using a country list, PHP 5.3 and anonymous functions.

You can watch the video via the in-page player and you can download either a copy of just the project or browse the whole repository for this and other projects.