It was long overdue but finally I've taken a look at Doctrine. And I'm blown away, bye bye Zend DB. [...] It's time to try and convey how awesome I think Doctrine is.

His example sets up a table definition and defines the associations between the columns for a "members" table. He defines a "city" table too and shows how Doctrine can easily combine the two and make selecting from and inserting into the tables simple.

For some time now I've been working on an administrative backend system. I quickly found the need to extend DB Table with more stuff than needed when I extended the Zend Framework, it's mostly convenience functions designed to reduce repetitive code snippets.

He illustrates with some of the custom override functions he's made including versions of updateOne, exists, fetchOne and fetchSomething.

As many know, Zend Framework 1.5.0 is almost ready for release... heck, it might even be released by the time you read this. There are a ton of new features worth looking into, but I'll list some of my own favorites here - the ones I've been either working on or using.

The list of updates for the release includes:

• Zend_Layout and Zend_View enhancements
• Zend_Form
• Zend_Search_Lucene
• Zend_Db_Table Improvements
• Context Switching and REST

If you want to get things prepared on your application, you can always download the latest release candidate (RC 3) of 1.5.0 and get to testing.

So you figured out how to define the relationships between your Zend_Db_Tables and you have issued a call to findDependentRowset(). You get your Rowset back but you need to sort the results by one of the columns in the dependent table. How do you do that?

Unfortunately, he's found out that you just simply can't - well, not without a custom function (until the 1.5 release of the framework rolls around). He shows his table set up and some sample database classes to relate to the tables (and link between them). The magic comes in with his DU_Utils class that takes in the data and sorts it based on the given column name in the given direction.

This mini release includes fixes for 33 issues since the 1.0.0 release only a month ago. These issues are generally bug fixes and improvements, though some feature additions have been included with this release. This release includes enforcement of our new policy of only publishing documentation translations that are at least 50% complete. [...] Also noteworthy for the 1.0.1 release are many improvements for Zend_Gdata and numerous bug fixes for >Zend_Db.

Suggestions for the upcoming 1.1.0 release can be made on this wiki page on the Zend Framework site, and this new version can be downloaded directly from the Zend Framework website.

This is the home stretch toward 1.0! Everyone has worked very hard for many months, and we are very close to finishing what we set out to do with Zend Framework 1.0. This Release Candidate is intended to show the complete set of features Zend Framework 1.0 has. Following the final 1.0 release, Zend Framework will continue to grow and improve, but there will be a great emphasis on maintaining backward-compatibility. That has been the mission of Zend Framework from the beginning, to provide a professional web framework with quality and stability.

Additions in this new release include updates to Zend_Gdata, the addition of the Zend_Service_StrikeIron web service client, seperate download packages (framework+docs versus just framework) and an update to the Zend_Db component. Check out the Changelog for the complete list of updates and fixes.

Well that's right, over the past couples weeks I have received emails, have seen comments and bug reports on my blog about the package I started couple weeks ago that let anyone use the Zend Framework without having to use the PDO extension. [...] I have decided to setup a new svn repository related to it.

You can access the main repository for the latest downloads here: http://dev.agoraproduction.com/zend/svn.

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).

Zend_Db is a layer which sits above the native PDO database extension. Before PDO (pre-PHP5.1) all we had to connect to databases were libraries that were developed in individual cycles and development teams, with little regard to what other database extensions were doing.

Taking this speed benefit of using PDO to do a majority of the work, PDO wrapper libraries like Zend_Db can supplement PDO with their own wrapper code leaving you with a fairly lightweight yet feature-rich database abstraction layer.

Aaron looks at connecting to a database (using both the PDO and DSN connections) and some example code showing how to work with the database using them - including queries and using transactions.