Yesterday I had some time to test Matthews Dojo View Helper and the Zend_Dojo_Form component. At a first glance the implementation looks great and can almost instantly generate you a very nice form with all the possible Dijit form extensions that Dojo has to offer.
If one were to refactor the Dojo Component to allow for jQuery elements one bigger problem appears. Dojo has a CDN (Content Distribution Network) for all its components, that is, the Zend Dojo components can load all javascript and css files from a distant server. JQuery can only offer its main library to be loaded from a CDN. All additional components, for example the jQuery DatePicker, have to be installed locally. This significantly reduces the possibility for rapid development of Javascript/Ajax/Form components with jQuery and Zend Framework.
One could offer a complete dependency downloadable archive with all the CSS, Javascript and Images inside, but this would be very complex to maintain. Looking at the future Zend Tool capabilities one possibility would be to offer a download client for all the relevant jQuery plugins, but there would have to be a man-middle-server that maintains the most up to date locations of all the plugins, which also has to be maintained. Does anybody have a better solution to solve this problem? Perhaps the jQuery Team needs to be made aware that they need a CDN for their most stable plugins.
Abstracting from the CDN problem, I implemented a simple jQuery View Helper (mostly copy paste and simple rewrites from Matthews Dojo component) and a HtmlElement Form Helper which constructs a Date-Picker from within the template. This is very easy to use and looks great. In the next days I will add further helpers for the jQuery plugins I use in my day to day work live and hope to present a demo. I might even opting for a jQuery proposal aiming at inclusion in the Zend Extras Library.
Update: I got a reply on the jQuery mailing list stating that a CDN is planned for the jQuery UI library. Sadly this does not include plugins for which one might desperately need a View Helper except for maybe the Date Picker. I will post further comments on this issue in the near future.