by Alan Knowles(alan_k@php.net)
Wolfram Kriesing posted note about thanking all PEAR contributors for
their work, helping him to develop his project quickly and easily, due to
the high quality of PEAR's code base. This is where PEAR shows it's strengths
by offering a consistent quality, and a flexible 'pick and choose' attitude,
developers lives are simplified, and projects using it are easier to manage
an maintain. It was another busy week on the mailing list, with discussions
on Virtual File Systems, plans for pear.php.net (along with getting ready
for PEAR's official release with PHP 4.3). The DBA package being broken apart,
and more fruits in PEAR. This week saw 4 stable and 3 Beta releases, along
with 2 more package proposals.
New Releases
Stable
- Image_GraphViz - A library to work with AT&T's GraphViz
tools (A graphing and visualization library)
- Benchmark - a framework to benchmark PHP scripts and functions.
- PHPUnit - a regression testing library to test the applications
so methods and output produces expected return values
- XML_Transformer - a Library to which enables you to bind
php functions to XML tags.
Beta
- DBA - A wrapper class for the DBA php functions, including
a file based DBA emulator
- Net_Dict - a library to query Internet Dictionary Servers
- Mail_Queue - a library to queue up the delivery of a large
number of emails.
PEAR-DEV traffic
Virtual File Systems
Jon Wood announced his intention to develop a Virtual File System Package
(VFS), this lead to an interesting discussion of using the Horde VFS implementation.
To this end, Chuck Hagenbuch of Horde packaged up Horde_VFS into a PEAR package
and made it available. However, the idea of implementing a Object Focused
API to a VFS still remains open, and ideas about how to reuse the existing
Horde_VFS code, and provide a object based API are being explored on pear-dev.
Last Weeks Weekly News
Many thanks to Pierre-Alain Joye, for last weeks PEAR weekly news, which he
stood in for me (as I was busy testing PHP on vending machines), It was a
refreshing read from a different viewpoint on the goings on in PEAR. And may
be a future direction of the newsletter to have different authors give you
a new perspective more often.
Plans for pear.php.net
Martin Jansen posted his plans for pear.php.net, including a more advanced
package proposal system, to try and alleviate some of the issues of proposals
getting lost in the daily traffic and making the process more transparent.
Along with this he is hoping to provide a more detailed developer's summary
page, listing open bugs, feature requests and more.There followed a lively
discussion on the merits of things like 'top ten' bug fixers, which was taken
off php-dev, mainly due to the fact that fixing bugs was not something that
should be motivated by becoming a 'top fixer', rather bugs where better addressed
in a more considered manner.
PEAR::Error Summary
Sebastian Bergmann posted a question about using the PEAR error facilities,
something that is core to the PEAR packages. Brent Cook provided a good
summary of the usage of PEAR_Error, and noted that PEAR_Error features
had not really been expanded, as they will probably undergo a major overhaul
when PHP5 is released (which features throw and catch for error handling).
DBA being broken into components - SQL_Parser, DBA_Relational and classic
DBA.
Brent Cook announced that he was breaking DBA package into three separate
ones, SQL_Parser, a package that can parse and read SQL statements, DBA_Relational
for providing SQL relation database features on top of DBA databases, and
the basic DBA package which offers a single API to work with DB2,GDBM, and
file based key,value databases.
PHPUnit the test suite, branched for Zend Engine 2 (PHP5)
Sebastian Bergmann announced he had created a branch of PHPUnit, for the Zend
Engine 2 (aka PHP5), the new branch features testing of namespaces, the new
pass by reference and real private members.
Bananas in PEAR?
It's been a busy week for Sebastian, he was also asking about putting SRM (an PHP Application Server), packages
into PEAR, as SRM classes are referred to as Banana's, after some discussion,
a base class, 'Banana' was decided on, so there will now be Banana's in the
Fruitiest Library around..
Bugs and Fixes
Thanks to these people for spotting bugs and sending fixes: Paweł Gołaszewski,
Michael Kefeder, Michael Fork, phpsurf, Francisco Benza.
New and Proposed Packages
Net_Dict, for querying Dictionary Servers
Chandrashekar Bhosle proposed a package to do Dictionary lookups using the
DICT Protocol, this was added to CVS this week, and looks like it will grow
to encapsulate some of the work that Jesus Castagnetto has already done on
a similar Class.
XSLT, a wrapper class for the PHP XML Stylesheet Tools
Pierre-Alain Joye announced a wrapper to XSLT (XML templating and stylesheet
markup standard), which provides a single API to support the multiple XSLT
backends available in PHP, (like domxsl, libxslt and msxml4).
Development
Active on CVS this week has been Auth, Benchmark, Cache_Lite, DB, DB_DataObject,
DBA, DBA_Relational, HTML_Common, HTML_Quickform, Image_GraphViz, Image_Transform,
Inline_C, Log, Mail_Queue, MDB, Net_Dict, Net_DNS, PECL:apd, PECL:bcompiler,
PECL:mailparse, PECL:smbd, PECL:spread, Perm_LiveUser, PHPUnit, SQL_Parser,
XML_Transformer.
New and updated documentation
PEARdoc2 will be uploaded to a new directory on the CVS server this week, allowing
porting of old documentation to the new standard.