Zend Controller & Zend View

One of the new features to hit the Zend Framework since 0.7 is Zend_Controller_ModuleRouter and its sibling Zend_Controller_ModuleRewriteRouter. This allows for separating out sets of controlers, models and views into their own modules.

Zend_View is a class for working with the "view" portion of the model-view-controller pattern. That is, it exists to help keep the view script separate from the model and controller scripts. It provides a system of helpers, output filters, and variable escaping.
Zend_View is template system agnostic; you may use PHP as your template language, or create instances of other template systems and manipulate them within your view script.
Essentially, using Zend_View happens in two major steps: 1. Your controller script creates an instance of Zend_View and assigns variables to that instance. 2. The controller tells the Zend_View to render a particular view, thereby handing control over the view script, which generates the view output.

Zend_Controller provides the foundation for building a website based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

The Zend_Controller system is designed to be lightweight, modular, and extensible. It is a minimalist design to permit flexibility and some freedom to users while providing enough structure so that systems built around Zend_Controller share some common conventions and similar code layout.

The Zend_Controller workflow is implemented by several components. While it is not necessary to completely understand the underpinnings of all of these components to use the system, having a working knowledge of the process is helpful.

Bootstrapping and Controllers and Actions.

Zend Framework has two versions of Routing mechanism: Zend_Controller_Router (the default) and Zend_Controller_RewriteRouter (sparingly documented). You can easily make them call indexController::noRouteAction() on unexistence controllers, but on unexistence actions theyÂ’ll throw you an exception.

Who works with Zend Framework, most likely, have read the “Zend_Controller / Getting Started” Zend Framework manual article, which explains how to use Zend_Controller in the root folder of the web server. But it does not answer on the “How to run my Zend Framework application in a subfolder of the web server document folder?” question and I propose you my solutions. First is rather a hack then a recommended solution, but with it you can start the applications and examples that use standard router. The second is neater but it depends on the Zend_Controller_RewriteRouter class.

Part of what I love about the Zend Framework is the ease at which a person can create views for static content.

In the previous article I introduced a method to describe routing information within a configuration file built specially for the Zend_Config object. The example code I gave was done in XML, but itÂ’s worth reiterating that the same can be done with an INI file or a file containing a PHP array.
Now IÂ’d like to extend the Zend_Controller_Front class to automate the retrieval and use of the configuration settings we capture in our Zend_Config object. WeÂ’ll use the Zend_Config object to create and build out a Zend_Controller_RewriteRouter object. Once weÂ’re done, weÂ’ll simply set it to our front controller like normal (almost), and dispatch our HTTP request.

So, this all started as I read about the Zend_Controller_RewriteRouter class. While building my own framework, routing was a particularly sticky issue to iron out, so I wanted to see how Zend handled the whole issue. And they did in a fine way, apparently somewhat borrowed from Ruby On Rails