by Alan Knowles(alan_k@php.net)

This week sees the number of PEAR packages hit 85, with Richard Stallman acknowledging that the latest version of the PHP license is far more FSF friendly and helping suggest licenses for PEAR. PEAR continue to grow with PHP offering an unrivaled library of quality code. Another busy week with a steady flow of releases, 2 Stable, 2 Beta, 1 Alpha and 1 development. More discussion on standards, and the move towards having method naming guidelines. APD starts focusing on profiling and MDB moves to release candidate #3. Along with a continuing stream of new packages with 5 proposed this week.


New Releases

Stable

Beta

Alpha

Development


PEAR-DEV traffic

Common Naming of methods

Following the release of HTML_Template_IT, Marcus Wolff brought up the idea of starting to document, and produce guidelines for more common methods within PEAR, methods like getHTML(), toString() where common requirements. Obviously a balance has to be found here, between breaking Backwards compatibility on existing classes and improving the general PEAR API, making it easy to use for all users.

APD focusing on profiling

George Schlossnagle, followed up with his addition of APD, the advanced PHP debugger, with discussion surrounding it new focus on profiling, and removing the original tracing functions, which where not really that useful in comparison to the new profiling code. The new code is available in the 'execute_wrapper' branch.

MDB moves to Release Candidate #3

Lukas Smith announced another MDB, the Metabase, pear database abstraction merger release candidate, he has been focusing on on the XML schema parser, along with fixes relating the the new MDB_Frontend Package. A lively conversation ensued this release, focusing on issues of making more drivers available, If you want to help out write MDB drivers for Oracle, MSSQL or any others, please contact Lukas on the mailing list.

Bugs and Fixes

Thanks to these people for spotting bugs and sending fixes: Jan Wagner, Mike McCallister, Wolfram Kriesing, Brent Cook

New and Proposed Packages

Console_Table - for displaying tabular output on terminals

Richard Heyes proposed a new package for displaying table like info on the terminal, and intended to continue work adding colour highlighting in bash.

Text_Password - for making pronounceable passwords

Martin Jansen proposed a new package to generate pronounceable passwords, After some discussion, it was generally agreed that a more general Text_Password, which included this feature and possibly a non-pronounceable password generator would be very useful.

MDB_Frontend - a phpMyAdmin type interface using MDB

Christian Dickmann proposed a new Package MDB_Frontend, designed to provide a Web based phpMyAdmin type interface to databases utilizing the new MDB abstraction layer, this was warmly received, after a bit of nudging by Christian.

Net_Ident - for getting ident data from a socket

Ondrej Jombik proposed a Net_Ident class, based on the work by Gavin Brown

Crypt_Xtea - a tiny encryption tool

Jeroen Derks uploaded a new class Crypt_Xtea, which provides a asymmetric encryption of binary strings using a Tiny encryption algorithm (called Xtea)

Development

Active on CVS this week has been Auth, Cache, Cache_Lite, DB_DataObject, DBA, HTML_QuickForm, HTML_Template_IT, Image_Transform, Mail, MDB, MDB_Frontend, Net_Curl, Net_URL, PEAR_Frontend_Web, PECL::apd, PECL::bcompiler, PECL::imagick, PECL::mailparse, Perm_LiveUser, SOAP_Interop, Text_Password, XML_Transformer

New and updated documentation

Changes and additions to HTML_Template_IT and HTML_Template_ITX should show up this week.