In this new post to his blog, Matthew Weier O'Phinney about some of the recent updates in the latest beta (beta5) of the Zend Framework 2's "Forms" component.

Forms are a nightmare for web development. They break the concept of separation of concerns: they have a display aspect (the actual HTML form), they have a validation aspect and the two mix, as you need to display validation error messages. On top of that, the submitted data is often directly related to your domain models, causing more issues. [...] Add to this that the validation logic may be re-usable outside of a forms context, and you've got a rather complex problem.

He talks about the newly-rewritten form component along with the new InputFilter to accompany it. He includes an example of using this new component - making a User form that, based off of some annotation rules, does some validation on the property values and things like "required" and custom types. He also talks about some of the other features included in the new package like hydration, complex annotation support and tools to work with collections.

You can download this latest beta release from the packages.zendframework.com site.