Rob Allen has a new post with a few introductory notes about the upcoming Zend_Application component of the Zend Framework that's coming and (if all goes well) will be deployed with the 1.8 version of the framework.

Zend_Application is now in the incubator and being actively developed for version 1.8 of Zend Framework. I've had a little play using it with a standard ZF application with no modules and this is what I've worked out so far. [...] Zend_Application is intended to make bootstrapping your application easier, presumably with less code.

He looks specifically at the bootstraping aspect of the component and comes up with an example Bootstrap.php file that sets up a configuration, a database resource, a view object and the location and information for the front controller. Another boostrap example shows how you can use a configuration file to do it similarly but more flexibly.