by Alan Knowles(alan_k@php.net)

Wolfram Kriesing posted note about thanking all PEAR contributors for their work, helping him to develop his project quickly and easily, due to the high quality of PEAR's code base. This is where PEAR shows it's strengths by offering a consistent quality, and a flexible 'pick and choose' attitude, developers lives are simplified, and projects using it are easier to manage an maintain. It was another busy week on the mailing list, with discussions on Virtual File Systems, plans for pear.php.net (along with getting ready for PEAR's official release with PHP 4.3). The DBA package being broken apart, and more fruits in PEAR. This week saw 4 stable and 3 Beta releases, along with 2 more package proposals.


New Releases

Stable

Beta


PEAR-DEV traffic

Virtual File Systems

Jon Wood announced his intention to develop a Virtual File System Package (VFS), this lead to an interesting discussion of using the Horde VFS implementation. To this end, Chuck Hagenbuch of Horde packaged up Horde_VFS into a PEAR package and made it available. However, the idea of implementing a Object Focused API to a VFS still remains open, and ideas about how to reuse the existing Horde_VFS code, and provide a object based API are being explored on pear-dev.

Last Weeks Weekly News

Many thanks to Pierre-Alain Joye, for last weeks PEAR weekly news, which he stood in for me (as I was busy testing PHP on vending machines), It was a refreshing read from a different viewpoint on the goings on in PEAR. And may be a future direction of the newsletter to have different authors give you a new perspective more often.

Plans for pear.php.net

Martin Jansen posted his plans for pear.php.net, including a more advanced package proposal system, to try and alleviate some of the issues of proposals getting lost in the daily traffic and making the process more transparent. Along with this he is hoping to provide a more detailed developer's summary page, listing open bugs, feature requests and more.There followed a lively discussion on the merits of things like 'top ten' bug fixers, which was taken off php-dev, mainly due to the fact that fixing bugs was not something that should be motivated by becoming a 'top fixer', rather bugs where better addressed in a more considered manner.

PEAR::Error Summary

Sebastian Bergmann posted a question about using the PEAR error facilities, something that is core to the PEAR packages. Brent Cook provided a good summary of the usage of PEAR_Error, and noted that PEAR_Error features had not really been expanded, as they will probably undergo a major overhaul when PHP5 is released (which features throw and catch for error handling).

DBA being broken into components - SQL_Parser, DBA_Relational and classic DBA.

Brent Cook announced that he was breaking DBA package into three separate ones, SQL_Parser, a package that can parse and read SQL statements, DBA_Relational for providing SQL relation database features on top of DBA databases, and the basic DBA package which offers a single API to work with DB2,GDBM, and file based key,value databases.

PHPUnit the test suite, branched for Zend Engine 2 (PHP5)

Sebastian Bergmann announced he had created a branch of PHPUnit, for the Zend Engine 2 (aka PHP5), the new branch features testing of namespaces, the new pass by reference and real private members.

Bananas in PEAR?

It's been a busy week for Sebastian, he was also asking about putting SRM (an PHP Application Server), packages into PEAR, as SRM classes are referred to as Banana's, after some discussion, a base class, 'Banana' was decided on, so there will now be Banana's in the Fruitiest Library around..

Bugs and Fixes

Thanks to these people for spotting bugs and sending fixes: Paweł Gołaszewski, Michael Kefeder, Michael Fork, phpsurf, Francisco Benza.

New and Proposed Packages

Net_Dict, for querying Dictionary Servers

Chandrashekar Bhosle proposed a package to do Dictionary lookups using the DICT Protocol, this was added to CVS this week, and looks like it will grow to encapsulate some of the work that Jesus Castagnetto has already done on a similar Class.

XSLT, a wrapper class for the PHP XML Stylesheet Tools

Pierre-Alain Joye announced a wrapper to XSLT (XML templating and stylesheet markup standard), which provides a single API to support the multiple XSLT backends available in PHP, (like domxsl, libxslt and msxml4).

Development

Active on CVS this week has been Auth, Benchmark, Cache_Lite, DB, DB_DataObject, DBA, DBA_Relational, HTML_Common, HTML_Quickform, Image_GraphViz, Image_Transform, Inline_C, Log, Mail_Queue, MDB, Net_Dict, Net_DNS, PECL:apd, PECL:bcompiler, PECL:mailparse, PECL:smbd, PECL:spread, Perm_LiveUser, PHPUnit, SQL_Parser, XML_Transformer.

New and updated documentation

PEARdoc2 will be uploaded to a new directory on the CVS server this week, allowing porting of old documentation to the new standard.