HMVC in Zend Framework

Question

Is it possible to use the HMVC pattern in Zend Framework? It is implemented in Kohana 3 by default and I really love it, so now I want to use it in Zend Framework.

Edit

I want to make it possible to: 1) include a complete request (like controller/action) inside an other request 2) make a direct call to the controller/action as above

It is not only used for widgets, but I also want to build a page which contains content of other pages...

Edit 2

To be a bit more clear: I do have a page object that contains several elements. These elements can be simple elements (text, image, etc) and special elements, which are controller:action calls. Each page can contain "unlimited" (special) elements. I simply want to loop through these elements, define which kind of element I'm dealing with and add the result of that Element to the content of my view.

Like:

foreach($Page->Elements AS $Element) {
    switch(get_class($Element)) {
        case "Base\TextElement":
            // Add text element to content
            ...
            break;
    case "Base\SpecialElement":
            // Get result of the controller:action call
            break;
        case "Base\ImageElement":
            // Add image element to content
            ...
            break;
        default:
            echo "No case defined for ".get_class($Element);
            die;
    }
}

Answer 1

It all depends, what are you trying to do.

Probably the action stack or action view helpers will do the work for you, but this may be not the best solution, because the dispatch overhead (probably will be removed in ZF2).

The second approach are view helpers with call to the models and actions in the controllers directly. You may use action helpers (and a static call to them) to access controller logic.

Also, see this blog post:

Using Action Helpers To Implement Re-Usable Widgets - phly, boy, phly