One Application Down: Some Zend Framework Thoughts

Tomorrow, I go to a (hopefully) final meeting with my client to wrap up the deployment of my first Zend Framework application. It’s gone very smoothly as a project all in all and is all over bar the shouting.

So what have I learned? In no particular order:

• Automatic rendering of the template from within the Action’s destructor is more hassle than it’s worth! It’s better to have a render() method and called $this->render() at the end of the action functions that need it.
• Setting up conventions for the names of templates and layout files is a big win. I put this functionality in AkCom_Controller_Action and it made it much quicker to add new actions to a controller.
• Creating a controller action class for this application was a good idea. This allowed me to put specific functionality for this application in a common place. All the other actions derived from it. I can see me doing this in all my apps from now on.
• Application specific Zend_View helpers are a Godsend!
• I created a classes directory within my application directory which has a directory structure similar to the Zend Framework’s. This allowed me to easily override and extend ZF classes as necessary and also a place to put application specific view helpers.
• I suspect that I will come up with an AkCom Application system that will facilitate creation of my Zend Framework applications. It’ll be quite lightweight, but will do the “grunt” work of setting up the directory structure that I’ve found to work for me.