by Alan Knowles (alan_k@php.net)
After last weeks hectic activity, this week calmed down with only 2 Stable
and 2 Beta Releases, along with continuing discussion on making documentation
as easy as possible, New Package Statistics, Signed Binary releases, PHPDoc
back to life and 2 new C extensions in PECL.
New Releases
Stable
- HTML_Javascript - for working with Javascript.
- Science_Chemistry - classes to represent Atoms, Molecules and Macromolecules.
Beta
- Math_Vector - for doing 2D and 3D vector Maths.
- MDB - the Metabase database Abstraction layer PEAR port.
PEAR-DEV traffic
Ready made binaries and Package Signing
Following some discussion on IRC, Marko Karppinen posted the plans
for distributing binaries of PECL (PHP extensions). Following the recent
OpenSSH incident where somebody put malicious code in a source distribution,
there is obviously a heightened need for additional security and checks here.
For more details on the proposal please read the post here.
Making Documentation easier
Currently underway and under consideration are 3 projects to try and make
writing documentation for PEAR easier.
- HTML to DocBook - Martin Jansen proposed a very simple mapping of HTML
type <H1> type tags to DocBook - see the notes here
- PHPDoc to DocBook - Alexander and Alan both mentioned this - Alan's approach
was to extend the PHP_Codedoc tool that he had written to do this.
Alexander will write an Docbook renderer for PHPDoc itself, the output
should be directly insertable into the PEAR Manual
- OpenOffice to DocBbook - Wolfram Kriesing was considering writing
a converter for OpenOffice XML -> DocBook
Package Statistics Improved
Tal Peer, added a full summary
for the package statistics, so you can see a list of how many times all the
packages has been downloaded.
High Speed file access
After a brief discussion about performance and file reading, Tomas Cox posted
a quick
benchmark illustrating fread() being noticeably faster than implode('',file()).
PHPDoc back to life
The Award Winning
Derick Rethans has picked up the gauntlet of fixing up PHPDoc, and is looking
for suggestions about what could be added to it.
Bugs and Fixes
Thanks to these people for spotting and fixing some bugs: Paweł Gołaszewski,
Thomas Schulz, James Flemer and Peter Bowen.
New and Proposed Packages
picoSQL
Bindings for the picoSQL
database have been added to PECL, picoSQL is a proprietary relational database
that has 'brought out into the open', with a LGPL license.
Python
John Praise Added his Python extension to PECL, enabling you to mix Python
and PHP, and access Python variables from PHP.
Development
Active on CVS this week has been PECL::picoSQL, PECL::python, Cache_Lite,
DB, MDB, PHPDoc, Archive_Tar, Mail, Auth, HTML_TreeMenu, HTML_JavaScript,
Net_Pop3, Net_Sieve, Net_URL, Pager, Mail_Mime, HTTP_Request, Tree, Math_Vector and
Science_Chemistry.