by Alan Knowles alan_k@php.net

Welcome to the first edition of the PEAR weekly news, hopefully the first of many!. The idea is to keep up to date with new pear packages, and developments on the PEAR mailing lists.

New Releases

Stable

Features for this week include, first release of the config package, updates to DB, the Database Abstraction Layer, the core PEAR classes , the HTTP authentication class Auth_HTTP,  pinging with NET_Ping and easy building of Tree menus with  HTML_TreeMenu.

Most Notably an updated PEAR Installer is available to test : take a look a the manual for instructions http://pear.php.net/manual/en/installation.getting.php

Beta

Beta releases of XML_svg2image, Pearified Metabase Database Abstraction layer - MDB are progressing and ready for testing.

PEAR-DEV traffic

User Authentication

A common theme returned in the form of an API for user registration and authenticating, while this has been discussed before, the general consensus was that it would be difficult to produce a generic API that would suit all applications . However there is alot of interesting reference material in the discussion, and pointers to developing something around LDAP or similar.

Pear Packages

Alexander brought up the idea for distributing applications using the pear package manager, didn't receive much response, but it is something that has been discussed on #pear, and all the members involved in the package manager are keen to see it happen, as soon as the packager is working reliably on windows and unix for the current PEAR packages

Caching On XMLRPC

To improve the performance of the installers Christian Dickmann has been adding a small simple caching layer to the pear xmlrpc site.

Pear Log and Windows/Unix differences

After a few experiments it was discovered that Windows and Unix have different Syslog error codes, which affected the PEAR:Log class, the intention was to stop using the system defines, and use a PEAR_LOG_* set.

Pear Weekly News

After some discussion about implementation for the weekly news, a simple file based news system was used, however the offer is open to anybody if they wish to use the pear 'notes' database table to implement a database version. - The initial code for PWN supports multi-language, and auto publishing on a Sunday.



Development

Active on CVS this week has been Pager, HTML_Tree_Menu, PEAR_Frontend_Web, MDB, DB, DB_DBA, HTML_Quickform,Tree, Image_Transform