Infrequently Noted

Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.

ZendCon Notes

I gave a talk on Dojo Wednesday at ZendCon, and when I walked into the room for the talk, there was some disorder as the conference center staff were taking out the tables to fit more chairs in. Even with the extra space, the room was totally packed, thanks in large part to the amazing Dojo integration work that the Zend team has done.

As of Zend Framework 1.6, you can include some trivial code inside your ZF views to pull in Dojo:

< ?
	// setup required dojo elements:
	$this->dojo()
		->enable();

echo $this->dojo(); ?>

Once enabled on your page, ZF 1.6 also includes a full set of helpers to let you set up Dijit components from PHP. The excellent ZF docs has the full story. Perhaps most exciting from my perspective, though, is how simple ZF makes getting up-and-running with Dojo and how nicely it ties in with custom builds and CDN-hosted versions of Dojo as well. Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Will Sinclair recently did a screencast that walks through a lot of these options. If you're considering ZF+Dojo, I strongly recommend you check it out.

The talk I gave on Wed was mostly focused on Dojo and the reasons we built it in the layered way that we have and how you can choose to use Dojo at whatever level of abstraction feels right for your app. Slides are here (5.1MB, PDF):