by Alan Knowles (alan_k@php.net)
Always a busy week in PEAR world, with 5 new releases, and 2 new packages
added, along with discussion on the status of the pear web site, Forum coming
back to life, and an MDB release candidate.
New Releases
Stable
- Var_Dump - A graphical version of the var_dump function in php
- Cache - A full featured Caching system for caching all kinds of data.
- Date- A class based representation of Dates which handles dates outside of the standard unix date (1970-2038)
Beta
- Cache_Lite - A fast and safe package to cache the output from your php scripts.
Development
- MDB - a merge of the PEAR DB and the Metabase Database Abstraction Layer.
PEAR-DEV traffic
Finding the Package list
There was a small discussion about displaying the link for the package list
on the front page of the pear website. This issue is tied up with the fact
that for current PHP releases, the only way to use the pear installer is
to use
lynx -source http://pear.php.net/go-pear | php
Whereas, when PHP 4.3.0 is released, this will no longer be required (the installer
will come with the PHP distribution), so using and accessing PEAR packages
will become considerably easier. Also as the site is still undergoing slight
changes it would be better to present a fully working distribution system, rather
than oversell the PEAR packager while it is still has a few minor
problems. So in the meanwhile, to see the pear website in it's full glory
you should use this address, and then refresh the page.
http://pear.php.net/?devme
One of the more annoying of these problems was fixed this week by Tomas Cox,
thanks to some diligent bug fixing, the process of creating a new package,
and uploading the first release is now considerably smoother.
Yet more languages for the weekly news.
Jesus M. Castagnetto, (co
author of Professional PHP Programming and a few PEAR packages), has started
the Spanish translations of the weekly news.
MDB Release Candidate 1
Lukas Smith announced that he considers
MDB, the Metabase/PEAR DB merger ready for beta testing, and was looking
for any gaps that need to be filled before declaring a 1.0 release.
PHP Category starts to get filled
After a bit of discussion, Frederic
Poeydomenge's Var_Dump Got uploaded into the new PHP Category, along with
PHPDoc, PHPUnit and bcompiler moved out of the PEAR category. Var_dump however still needs
renaming to fit in with the PEAR naming standards, eg. PHP_VarDump or PHP_Var_Dump.
More Zend Engine 2 issues
Brad Bulger spotted that using the new
Zend Engine, has some interesting side effects, that are probably worth keeping
an eye out for. The issue he found was tha the mkdir method in the System
Package, has the same name as a standard PHP function, since you don't need
to use $this->mkdir() anymore to call a local method in ZE2, the Engine
was confusing mkdir (the system call) for mkdir the method call...
Forum comes back to life
Radek Maciaszek asked if he could take over some of the development of the
Forum package, converting it more to PEAR standards and adding a few features.
As usual this was met with much fanfare and encouragement.
Docbook made easy - OpenOffice XSLT
Sandro Zic popped up to mention that there are already OpenOffice to Docbook XSLT converters available at http://www.chez.com/ebellot/ooo2sdbk/, if anybody wants to try it, the PEAR community would be very keen to see the results.
Bugs and Fixes
Thanks to these people for spotting and fixing some bugs, James Flemer, Mika
Tuupola, Matt Allen, Rob, Pierre-Alain Joye, Arnaud Limbourg,Troels Arvin and
Wim Vinckier
New and Proposed Packages
Var_Dump
Var_dump is a more detailed and elegant var_dump() to output variables. At the moment it is focused on HTML output.
PECL::Threads
After finally working out the technical issues behind
adding Threading support to PHP, Alan Knowles and Shane Caraveo have now a
roughly working prototype in PECL, this is a cross platform extension that
at the moment allows you to start another thread in php using the include
type syntax, and pass variables between both threads. Extremely useful for
developing TCP type servers or GTK applications.. A more standard thread_create('function_name'),
type interface is also underway.
Development
Active on CVS this week has been MDB, HTML_Javascript,
HTML_Post, DB_DataObject, PECL::Threads, I18N, Console_Getopt, Cache_Lite,
Auth, DB, Date, HTML_QuickForm, DB_ldap, HTTP_Upload, Math_Numbers and Net_Ping.