by Alan Knowles (alan_k@php.net)
After a weeks break due to jetlag from the PHP Conference, this weeks
news covers all the events from both weeks. It was a pretty busy few
weeks for discussions on the mailing list, and A considerable amount of
new packages where proposed, taking PEAR closer to the point where it is
larger than CPAN.... I've left out the Release summary, as this
is really available at the end of the News, and have focused more on
news from the list and a quick summary of all these new packages.
PEAR-DEV traffic
Include Path Solutions
After some discussion in the last few months about how to deal with
PEAR package installation folders, and web hosted enviroments, Stig
Bakken announced the plan to add a new directive to php,
'{get,set,restore}_include_path()', to make it possible to modify the
include path, even on hosted site running under safe mode (where
ini_set) may be disabled.
PHPdoc to PEAR manual converter
Alexander announced the release of his PHPdoc to PEAR manual
convertor, based around the phpdoc code.
http://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~meal/pd2pm-0.5.zip
Along with this, Greg Beaver also announced that he was 85% done,
creating a phpdocumentor to peardoc2 convertor, between the two, the
options for quickly building manual documenation is considerably easier
now.
New Peardoc mailing list
Pear manual writing has now got it's own mailing list, So if you want
to help out document some of the great packages available in pear sign
up by sending an email to
pear-doc-subscribe@lists.php.net
PHP Documentor comming to PEAR
Greg Beaver announced the release of a new version of phpDocumentor, an
actively worked on phpdoc to html/pdf etc. tool. he also announced his
intention to package it up and make it available via the pear
installer and web site.
Graphing Packages in PEAR
Richard Udovich Announced he had started working on a Graphing Package,
a long discussion followed regarding the JpGraph Package which is
already in the php cvs tree, which is available under a dual licence,
QPl, and a commercial one.
Bugs and Fixes
Thanks to these people for spotting and fixing some bugs Paweł
Gołaszewski, Arnaud Limbourg, Mika Tuupola and Yavor Shahpasov. Since
there was nearly 500 messages in the last two weeks, I've probably
missed a few fixes, this does not mention the many fixes that are sent
directly to the maintainers as well..
New and Proposed Packages
Spreadsheet_Excel, for working with Excel files
Xavier Noguer announced his Excel writing class, based arround the CPAN
Spreadsheet::WriteExcel module by John McNamara, It includes many
features for writing and creating excel files on the fly, including the
basics of setting cell data, along with formating, formulas, images and
alot of other stuff.. after some discussion of the name, it should be
appearing in PEAR shortly.
XDB - an XML database interface
Richard Samar announced an wrappers to access XML Databases Xindice and
Tamino.
Pager_Sliding - a richer Pager class
Lorenzo Alberton announced a new Sliding Pager Class, which has a
similar API to the existing Pager class in PEAR, but offers a richer
interface. Lorenzo was very generous and implemented a Template friendly
addition.
PECL::SPPLUS - access for a french Payment gateway
Nicolas Chaillan announced a php extension for accessing the French
bank Caisse Epargne's payment gateway.
HTML_Template_SmartyLite - SimpleTemplate
After a discussion with Alan, at the PHP Conference, Wolfram Kriesing
announced his intention to make Simple Template, his Smarty like
Templating engine, which features I18N translation tools, and Caching
available in PEAR. The idea is to merge the features of
HTML_Template_Flexy, which was a fork from an older version of
SimpleTemplate back into the Core and replace HTML_Template_Flexy.
MySQL UDF - embedded PHP in Mysql
David Sklar announced a Mysql Extension that enables you to write
stored procedures in PHP within Mysql, this uses the new PHP embedded
build avaiable in the forth-comming PHP 4.3.
DataObjects for LDAP
Chrigu announced his intention to develop a DataObjects type interface
package for LDAP
Mnogosearch - a new wrapper to the search engine
Bertrand Mansion announced that he had created an updated interface
package for the Mnogosearch search engine, enabling it to be used with
any of the common PHP template systems eg. Smarty and HTML_Template_IT.
Numbers_Spell
Piotr Klaban announced a package that converts numbers into Words in a
variety of languages, currently American, British and Polish are
supported.
Data Structures
Robin Johnson announced that he was intending to develop a series of
classes to deal with Data Structure storage, in a similar way to that
done by Java Collections.
Development
Active on CVS this week has been Cache, Cache_Lite, Date, DB,
DB_DataObject, DB_ldap, DBA, File_Find, File_HtAccess, FSM,
HTML_Javascript, HTML_QuickFrom, HTML_TreeMenu, Log, MDB, Net_URL,
PECL::apd, PECL::mailparse, PECL::optimizer, PECL::python, PECL::spplus,
SOAP, Text_Password, XML_Transformer, PEAR.