by Alan Knowles(alan_k@php.net)
This week has seen a flood of new package proposals, PEAR continues to grow into a high quality library of PHP code and extensions. This week sees 1 new
Releases, along with 6 proposed packages and news on peardoc2, working through
issues with environment variables in system and a steady flow of CVS commits.
New Releases
Stable
- DB_ado - An interface to Microsoft's ADODB Database Abstraction Layer.
PEAR-DEV traffic
PEAR doc2
Plans are still underway to upgrade the pear manual into
a more flexible layout, Alexander posted news of the proposed layout and
source a few weeks ago, and hopefully will complete converting the documentation
of the remaining few packages. So it can replace the current manual.
Notices in System.php
The system package came under the spotlight as the use of $_ENV, could
not be relied upon 100% (due to a option in php.ini), and the other alternative
getenv(), involved a slower function call to retrieve the data, in the end
the class now goes through attempting to find the data from the fastest to
the slowest source.
Syndicating PEAR Weekly News by RSS
Jesus Castagnetto suggested
producing the weekly news in RSS format, so that the news can be syndicated
by other sites. This sounds like a great idea and hopefully during the next
few weeks the finer details can be sorted out.
Bugs and Fixes
Alot of Bugs and Fixes where added this week, Thanks to these
people for spotting them, Bjoern Frantzen, Ondrej Jombik, David Jean Louis, ,Jeroeon Derks, Hakan Kuecuekyilmaz, Arnaud Limbourg, Kubo Atsuhiro.
New and Proposed Packages
An Alternative Auth
Wolfram Kriesing Proposed an alternative Auth
Class, this one focuses on the checking of Authentication against a number
of back-ends, including Databases, ldap, NIS, SOAP (and quite a few more).
It also has a number of features for dealing with directory level authentication
and leaves the 'login page' location and look up to the user.
APD, the Advanced PHP Debugger extension
George Schlossnagle proposed
moving the APD php extension into PECL, after a fanfare of votes for it,
it can now be found in the PECL directory in CVS. APD features profiling
and back-trace support, along with remote program stepping.
Metar Weather reading
Yavor Shahpasov proposed a new class for reading weather information from
Metar weather sources, after some discussion, naming it Weather_Metar currently
is the favored name for this package.
Ogg Vorbis PHP extension
Dave Broudy announced a php extension to read data from ogg vorbis files (like
mp3's), this was accepted and should appear in CVS shortly.
An alternative Excel writing package
Xavier Noguer offered a new implementation of the File_Excel class, Although
not complete he believed it was further along than the current File_Excel.
Mike Tuupola responded by saying due to a lack of time he had been unable
to get much further with the original File_Excel, and was willing to have
it replaced with this new implementation.
Gnu PGP extension for PECL
Patrick O'Lone offered a binding to the Gnu PGP Made Easy Library, this (like
the smbclient class) has some issues with GPL code, that need to be resolved
first, but hopefully if that can be worked out this would make another great
extension for PHP.
Development
Active on CVS this week has been Auth, Auth_HTTP,
Benchmark, Cache_Lite, DB, DB_DataObject, DB_ldap, DBA, HTML_QuickForm, HTML_Template_Flexy,
Image_Transform, Log, Mail, MDB, PECL::imagick, Perm_LiveUser, PHP_Doc, PHPUnit,
Tree, XML_Transformer,
New and Updated Documentation
Changes and additions to xml_Transformer, db_DataObject, PECL::SOAP and PECL:APD should show up this week.