Zend Framework 1.5 Preview

The Zend Framework team recently announced the release of the preview for version 1.5 of the framework. I’m excited to play around with several new components, specifically the OpenID and LDAP authentication adapters and the Zend_Form module.

I haven’t really gotten on the OpenID bus yet, but it seems promising, and I can certainly smile at the idea of one day being able to login to the web, rather than individual websites. Imagine not having to remember the password that took six tries to match the byzantine rules for password robustness set by web development team. There’s a very significant security risk involved with the technology at first glance: if you can login everywhere with one set of credentials, if/when they get stolen, the thief has access to EVERYTHING. Security and convenience are often at odds. it will be interesting to see how OpenID addresses these concerns as digital security gets more attention in the coming years.

Zend_Form looks to be the next promising tool in the line of HTML form generating libraries. It may initially stick in the craw of Model-View-Controller hardliners, as the examples provided in the Zend Documentation program the form in a controller action, but when you think about it, forms are more than just presentation. They’re one of the main interactions with any application, and the logic that must be applied to form input can be very sophisticated.

In fact, form validation is an instance where tight coupling is appreciated. While the layout of a form should not be linked with filtering and validation, the composition of a form should be. I will always want to validate every form field - that’s not going to change. Since I don’t have to accommodate that change in process, it’s great that I can be saved some development and maintenance time by binding validators and filters to the presentation of a form element directly. With luck, I’ll get the time to use Zend_Form soon.