by Alan Knowles alan_k@php.net

This week includes 3 new releases both beta and development versions, ready to be tested, Along with news on the PEAR Package Installer, Smarty and Developers Birthdays.


New Releases

Beta

MDB, the merge of PEAR DB and Metabase includes more fixes to the PostgreSQL driver and some API cleanups, HTML_Javascript, a package to help convert php variable for use in javascript and a few javascript tools.

Devel

DBA, a wrapper for the php DBA functions and an implementation of an SQL driver for DBA database

PEAR-DEV traffic

MDB Return by reference

There was a brief discussion on how metabase should handle return values, it appears Metabase (what MDB is based on) tended to return values by using return by reference eg.
getTextValue($bar, $bar_quoted);
$query = 'SELECT * from foo WHERE bar = '.$bar_quoted;
However it was considered that this method was uncommon in PEAR generally. The current standard of returning mixed, PEAR_error or the result will still be the prefered method for returning arguments. Meanwhile Paul Cooper has been helping out Lukas Smith with the Postgres driver.

How will Zend Engine 2 (PHP5)'s catch/throw affect PEAR_error?

Stig is still experimenting with ZE2's try catch methods, and the future of returning PEAR_errors (for ZE2 only packages) will be decided later (although Backward Compatibility issues will obviously be a serious factor in this).

Installer moving forward

More testing was underway to iron out bugs with the installer, especially on Win32 platforms, the lynx piping still has issues with Win32, the current recommended method for installing on win32 is still.
c> lynx -source http://pear.php.net/go-pear > go-pear
c> php -d output_bufering=0 -q go-pear

Package.xml - checking consistancy

In a discussion about packaging of HTML_OOH_Forms, it was mentioned that the pear package manager can check a package.xml using
pear pv
In this situation the reason for a package prolems was that the role for a file in a package has to be one of these types = eg. <file role="???">filename.x</file>
php ext test doc data src script

Pear and Smarty

It was asked why Smarty http://smarty.php.net had not become part of pear on the main pear mailing list, The reason really revolved around the fact that nobody has really volunteered the time and effort to pearify Smarty (and provide a BC layer).

DB::Sybase

Antônio Carlos Venâncio Júnior, has been doing bits of work with the DB::Sybase component of the DB abstration layer and asked if anyone was available to help test it. He has also been helping out adding phpdoc comments.

PEAR Manual and Birthdays

Alexander promised to try and have the new pear manual working for his birthday on the 25th (and Thomas Cox's is on the 24th) - If PEAR has helped you, have a look at their wishlists. The result of these manual fixes should mean that a more indepth documentation can be done for each package, and the Manual Navigation should work alot better.

Proposed Packages:

Sebastião Rocha has proposed a Report generator class some of the ideas are layed out at http://www.i-node.com.br/report

Development

Active on CVS this week has been DB, DB_DataObject , DBA, HTML_Javascript, HTML_OOH_Form, HTML_QuickForm, Log, Mail_Mime, MDB, Net_NNTP, PEAR_Frontend_Gtk, PECL/soap, PHPUnit, SOAP, XML_Tree, XML_XPath,