What does this buy you? You get to use the Zend helpers for Dojo as you normally would, simplifying how you pull in code, declare components, and build your UI. What this new integration saves you is the tedium of figuring out which components you’re using everywhere, building a layer file for it, kicking off a build, and remembering to re-visit the layer definition when you project adds or removes modules. Hopefully ZF 1.9 should lower the barrier to taking advantage of the full range of Dojo-based optimizations, making it easier to prototype quickly and deploy easily. Exciting stuff!

If you haven’t tried out ZF, it really does make building sophisticated Dojo-based UI’s really simple. A bit part of that is that it helps automate a lot of the stuff that may be confusing when you’re first starting out with Dojo.

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

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< ? 
	// 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):

Fundamentally the Dojo and Zend teams really “get” each other. Both are deep packages that give you an opinion about how best to do something but also all of the tools you’ll need to make it work at scale. The “use at will” term that the Zend folks use made immediate sense to us. Like Dojo, Zend doesn’t saddle you with more than you’re really going to need up-front, but at the same time, when you need something awesome which is well tested and integrated, it’s right there. No digging around on google to find a “plug in” that will get you where you want to go…both Zend and Dojo give you a full stack of great components to work with out of the box.

There have been some questions on IRC today about why Dojo and not something else, and we know that the Zend folks are committed to continuing to allow Zend to work with other frameworks as well and we fully support them in that. There seem to be lots of choices of Ajax frameworks which Zend could have integrated, but when you look at the requirements of serious products which need to ship tested solutions to really hard problems, the field whittles down very fast. In response to the needs of our users, both Zend and Dojo take seriously our responsibilities to provide integrated, high-quality, unambiguously licensed products that will let user scale both up and down. Key to this is understanding the full spectrum of use-cases, informed by past experience, and striking a balance between enterprise-ready features and close-to-the-metal primitives. The Zend Framework has a larger view of the server-side than Dojo can, and as a result there are new opportunities to optimize and improve the user experience for all classes of users through this integration. This isn’t just about including some scripts on a page, this integration is about improving user and developer experiences, and both Dojo and Zend bring a lot to the table which can compliment the other. Dojo’s strengths in progressive enhancement, packaging, localization, and accessibility all have obvious allegories in the ZF world where a complete integration can more value based on what developers are already doing. All of those features of Dojo will work better when the server-side knows how to “hint” things for the client and work with, not against, the client to deliver better experiences.

I’m perhaps most excited about the data-driven opportunities in the Zend/Dojo integration. Dojo’s data infrastructure is second-to-none, and the design of the dojo.data and dojo.rpc layers provide Zend Framework integration the ability to take advantage of systems like the incredible Dojo Grid and the client-side charting package. There’s more to look forward to, and figuring it out together with the folks at Zend is a great opportunity for the Dojo community.

Pete Higgins and I will be participating in next Tuesday’s discussion with a broader chunk of the Zend Framework world, but until then (and long after) we’ll be hanging out in the #dojo and #zftalk channels on irc.freenode.net. We’re looking forward to working more with the ZF community to build great experiences, and are hugely excited about the direction things are already taking!