Clients are the interface which bridges a user or external tool into
the Zend_Tool_Framework system. Clients can come in all
shapes and sizes: RPC endpoints, Command Line Interface, or
even a web interface. Zend_Tool has implemented the command
line interface as the default interface for interacting with
the Zend_Tool_Framework system.
To implement a client, one would need to extend the following abstract class:
<?php
abstract class Zend_Tool_Framework_Client_Abstract
{
/**
* This method should be implemented by the client implementation to
* construct and set custom loaders, request and response objects.
*
* (not required, but suggested)
*/
protected function _preInit();
/**
* This method should be implemented by the client implementation to parse
* out and set up the request objects action, provider and parameter
* information.
*/
abstract protected function _preDispatch();
/**
* This method should be implemented by the client implementation to take
* the output of the response object and return it (in an client specific
* way) back to the Tooling Client.
*
* (not required, but suggested)
*/
abstract protected function _postDispatch();
}
As you can see, there 1 method is required to fulfill the needs of a client (two others suggested), the initialization, prehandling and post handling. For a more in depth study of how the command line client works, please see the source code.