Phly, boy, phly
the weblog and site of Matthew Weier O'Phinney

Dojo announced today the availability of 1.1.0.

I've been toying with Dojo off-and-on for almost a year now. It's the most framework-y of the various JS toolkits I've tried, and I particularly appreciate its modularity. (That said, it can lead to a lot of HTTP requests to your site if you don't create a targetted bundle with the modules you need.)

The 1.1.0 release has me pretty excited, as it finally is doing something most other JS frameworks have been doing for some time: its XHR requests now send the "X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest" header, which allows it to conform to the isXmlHttpRequest() method in Zend Framework's request object. This makes it much easier to provide a standard mechanism in your server-side code for detecting AJAX requests, allowing context switching to be automated.

Update: this article is now available in French, courtesy of Frédéric Blanc.

I've fielded a number of questions from people wanting to know how to handle authentication and identity persistence in Zend Framework. The typical issue is that they're unsure how to combine:

• An authentication adapter
• A login form
• A controller for login/logout actions
• Checking for an authenticated user in subsequent requests

It's not terribly difficult, but it does require knowing how the various pieces of the MVC fit together, and how to use Zend_Auth. Let's take a look.