Some people have reported issues with accessing, setting, or getting the right value from baseUrl() in a view script. But I'm wondering why it is necessary to use it at all, at least in a situation like mine where the ZF application is on a virtual private host (Amazon EC2) where I have full control of the directory structure and apache rewrite rules, as well as routes.
I know, for example, that in the filesystem foo.jpg lives in public/images/foo.jpg, and that the application's mod_rewrite will direct all requests to public - so in my view scripts it's a lot simpler/clearer and more efficient to write something like
<img src="/images/foo.jpg" />
instead of
<img src="<?php echo $this->baseUrl();?>/images/foo.jpg" />
What sort of future-proofing robustness or other benefit does the use of baseUrl() really provide? So far I haven't used it at all, and had no problem. But I've inherited some code that uses it, and my inclination is to strip out those uses whenever I'm editing a view script that contains them. Would I regret that later?
Used this way, it's not really useful, but on the other hand, using it this way
echo $this->baseUrl('/images/foo.jpg')
might prove to be useful in the future since you can add logic before printing the URL. Imagine that in a few years your website grows way more than you expected and you have to move all your static content to a Content delivery network (CDN) you will have to manually (or with search and replace) correct all your images/css/js instances URLs. With the baseUrl() (or as name it assetUrl()) you would just have to add your CDN's url and it will be fixed everywhere in your application.
EDIT
I found a use for the baseUrl() in the code you inherited :
It would allow you to add a common URL part to all of your links and references, in the case that your site is not at the root of the domain
i.e. : www.mysite.com/zf-app/
In your config file you would just have to add
resources.frontController.baseUrl = "/zf-app/"
for it to work, and all of your links would be prepended with that part
Perfect example. I have a couple of basic Zend-y utilities I built on separate systems. On my test platform, I just virtual host them all each with their own document root. Generally I access these tools over a remote web browser but that requires I VPN to the system running it as I didn't create these tools to be on anything more than a subnet and don't really want to expose them to an internet facing site. So along comes android phones and things like bitweb server that allows you to run a lighttpd, php and mysql in minimalized forms on a pocket cell phone. Only problem is, it's not really set up to be powerful enough to virtual host on android operating systems. No problem, it will allow for basic aliasing, so I just move all the tools each into their own sub-directory on my sdcard and use lighttpd mod_alias definitions to point to each and then create re-write rules for each subdirectory. But that led me to this post and others like it to fix all the static urls that pointed to href="/some/path/to/static/content" I even had to update some urls to zend tools that were absolute paths to utilize {view}->url() calls instead. By adding the baseUrl calls to the front of the static content, and using the view url() method for calling controller actions, I can now move the entire Zend MVC for any one of the independent tools into any directory I want and have them run from as deep in the web-tree as I desire. Zend does the rest and all it takes is 2-3 properly formatted entries in the lighttpd conf file.