by Alan Knowles (alan_k@php.net)

This weeks news is brought to you live from the speakers room at the PHP Conference in Frankfurt (which is very quite as everyone is working on their speeches, Alexander will be giving a talk on PEAR Tommorow (Wednesday Morning). It's been a busy conference so far, and I'll start taking a few pictures, hopefully, of the PEAR and PHP crew who are here.

This weeks on the mailing list has details of a revived Payment Bibit package, the PEAR installer in Web format becoming available, PEAR mentioned in relation to Yahoo (and us developers wondering if we are going to see the Powered by PEAR logo there), and Java DataObjects equivilant in PEAR. Along with this two new packages have been proposed, A specialized Geneology class and another PHP extension from George Schlossnagle, a byte code optimizer). Along with our usual list of new releases.


New Releases

Stable

Beta


PEAR-DEV traffic

Payment_Bibit back to Life

Dave Mertens, who began a class to work with Bibit payment, has been swamped with requests since he removed the incomplete class from PEAR, he posted that he was going to try and attempt to finish it in his spare time, as there was so much demand.

go-pear goes web based

Christian Dickmann announce a trial version of the Web based pear installer, that could be downloaded and installed, helping to bootstrap the pear package manager in cases where command line access was difficult, you can help test it out by downloading it from

http://dickmann.homeunix.org/pear/pearweb/public_html/go-pear.php

PEAR's mention at PHPCon (US), as Yahoo moves to PHP

PEAR got a breif mention at PHPCon in the US, during the reasoning behind Yahoo beginning migration of alot of it's sites to PHP. While it mentioned that PEAR does not yet compare to CPAN, all regular readers know that the aim (when PHP4.3) is release is to provide something that is better (in quality, if not quantity yet) than CPAN.

Java DataObjects equivialent in PEAR

Andi Guntmans (of Zend Fame), posted asking about an equivilant to Java DataObjects in PEAR. While DB_DataObjects provides some of the features he was asking, he was keen to see a more complete implementation, matching and exceeding the functionality of the Java Version. Watch this space for more developments.
 

Bugs and Fixes

Thanks to these people for spotting and fixing some bugs Andres Salomon, Lorenzo Alberton and Javier Conti


New and Proposed Packages

Bytecode Optimizer

George Schlossnagle announced his intention to commit a new tool to optimize PHP bytecodes, this would be of benifit to APC and bcompiler, and would provide an open source alternative to the optimizers provided by Zend and InCube.

Genealogy_Gedcom - A specialized class for Genealogy

Olivier Vanhoucke announced a class which helps with Geneology analysis, for those working in this field, obviously of great use.


Development

Active on CVS this week has been Auth, Auth_HTTP, Date, DBA, File_HtAccess, File_Password, HTML_Quickform, HTML_Select, HTML_Talbe, HTML_TReeMenu, I18N, Image_Transform, Log, Mail, MDB, Net_UserAgent, Pager, PECL::apd, Tree and some more updates to peardoc2, which is making use of alexander new tool pd2pm (to save time converting phpdoc comments to peardoc.