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