Probably the biggest change in Zend Framework (ZF) 1.6 is about Ajax support with integration of famous Dojo JavaScript toolkit. ZF 1.6 comes with several new helpers, elements and components that help to display/interact with Dojo widgets as announced on Zend’s official site.

• A dojo() placeholder view helper to facilitate Dojo integration in your views, including setting up the required script and style tags, dojo.require statements, and more. In essence, this supports and enhances Dojo’s modularity at the application level.
• Zend_View helpers and Zend_Form elements and decorators that utilize Dijit, Dojo’s layout and widget platform. This simplifies creation of Zend_Form elements that can be rendered as Dijits. For instance, highly interactive widgets such as calendar choosers, time selectors, and combo-boxes are provided.
• Zend_Dojo_Data, a component for creating dojo.data-compatible response payloads. dojo.data defines a standard storage interface; services providing data in this format can then be consumed by a variety of Dojo facilities to provide highly flexible and dynamic content for your user interfaces.
• A JSON-RPC server component: Zend_Json_Server. JSON-RPC is a lightweight remote procedure call protocol, utilizing JSON for its serialization format; it is useful for sites that require a high volume of interaction between the user interface and server-side data stores, as it allows exposing your server-side APIs in a format directly accessible via your client. Dojo has native JSON-RPC capabilities, and Zend Framework provides a JSON-RPC implementation that is both compatible with Dojo and the published specifications.

In order to help developer track JavaScript bugs, ZF 1.6 also provides native support for FirePHP, a Firebug extension for PHP-Ajax development. Using ZF 1.6 now you can log to Firebug Console via FirePHP instantly, no need to download the FirePHPCore library.

Two primary components are available — Zend_Log_Writer_Firebug and Zend_Db_Profiler_Firebug – providing functionality to log (any info you want) and profile database queries to Firebug console. Read more how to utilize FirePHP in ZF 1.6 here.

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