“Helpers” in Zend Framework — What are these creatures?

So, when I was getting familiar with Zend Framework I’ve encountered with the concept of  “Helpers”. Now I know that understand  ZF without the knowledge of what  these “Helpers” are is impossible.

Because I was noob (and still I am), I was surprised to see that we can speak about “Action_Helpers” and “View_Helpers”, too.

So first I wanted to understand whats the difference between these two basic types of Helpers. I found a very nice and short comparsion on stackowerflow about this.  I copy-paste the main idea behind these Helpers:

“An ActionHelper is for reusable functionality needed in the actions of your Controllers, while a ViewHelper is for reusable functionality in your View Templates…”

Now I understood the theory or “motivation” behind the concepts of _Helpers. Of course the job just half way done. In order to understand fully what a Helper is doing one needs to know how create/use them exactly in action..

So I found the following VERY clear short tuts:

• Lysender’s short tutorial about Action_Helpers.
• akrabat’s also short and also great tutorial about View_Helpers.

Both are very nice tutorials. Highly recommended who wants to understand the basics of _Helpers.