Greg Beaver's Blog: Planting PEAR seeds - you can decide PEAR's future
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In his latest post, Greg Beaver gets excited about some of the recent advancements in PEAR including: more traffic on the mailing lists, improvements to the acceptance policies and documentation for packages, and fun things like the download statistics and a Google Map of developers.    His real excitement comes with the latest offering the PEAR group is creating to pull more of the PHP community into the project and make them feel a part - a new election interface to vote on packages and the future of PEAR.   Most of the important decisions I mentioned will be decided by a general election, meaning that the users of PEAR, not just the developers, will have a voice in the direction PEAR decides to take.   PEAR developers out there are already registered to vote, but if you'd like to get in on the action, head over to the signup form and get involved today.
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In a new blog entry today, Matthew O'Phinney talks about updates (and refactoring) that he's done to a PEAR package he's developed, File_Fortune.   Over the past few evenings, I've refactored File_Fortune to have it implement Iterator, Countable, and ArrayAccess -- basically allowing it to act like an array for most intents and purposes. As a result, I've eliminated the need for the File_Fortune_Writer package, and greatly simplified the usage.   The package is designed to make an interface between the casual PHP user and the fortune files common on most *nix machines. To illustrate he update, he includes some code that grabs the fortune file, parses it to grab a random one and echoes them out. Also included is the save() method so you can add your own to the list easily.
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On his blog today, Mike Lively has posted about the work h's done to create a database extension for the popular unit testing software for PHP, PHPUnit.   For those that may not have read any of my previous postings on the subject the goal of this software is to extend the functionality of PHPUnit to allow using seed data to put a given database into a known state prior to executing each test. It also provides an easy mechanism to compare database contents with an expected dataset.   Mike has just completed the initial feature set for his project - more or less a port of DBUnit over to PHP. The post includes not only details about this initial release but also code that demonstrates its use. In his example, it's used to validate that a bank account has been created properly by comparng database information before and after the insert.
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Greg Beaver points out the numerous releases that were made in the PEAR community today - including an update to the PEAR website itself.   OK, today's release party wins.  I've just uploaded the 8th package for release, and it's a very significant day of releases.   The three updates made today are:  An update to the PEAR website that allows for patch tracking in the bug tracker The latest version of PHP_ParserGenerator - version 0.1.5 and the release of the first, full-featured parser for PHP - PHP_Parser along with a "companion", PHP_Parser_DocblockParser
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Lukas Smith is sending a wakeup call to the internet providers and web hosters out there - get involved in the PHP community!   We do not seem to have any ISP's active inside the PHP community. This is kind of odd, considering that PHP seems to be driving the business of hosters quite a bit. Why have none of them decided that PHP is important enough for their business that its worthwhile to ensure that their interests are taken into account?   He makes the suggestion of passing along the suggestion to bosses/co-workers/anyone who'll listen about getting involved. Suggested places to start would be as a part of the testers group or even contributing to the migration guide.
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Gerd Schauffelberger writes on the PHP-Tools Blog today about the contents of the latest issue from the German PHP Magazine, specifically an article covering the PEAR package HTML_AJAX.   This article's target is (1st) to give a brief introduction to AJAX and how things work from Javascript an PHP side in contrary. Also (2nd) I wanted to show that you actually don't have to muck around with a mess of Javascript (browser compatibility issues and such) because it's it is all done by the Joshua Eichorn's HTML_AJAX framework.    The article doesn't build up an entire application (as Gerd mentions) but it does provide you a good base to work from and gives you a good direction to head from to learn more about this powerful package.
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In a new post Richard Heyes links to a replacement for the popular PEAR::DB package:   PEAR::DB is all well and good if you want to connect to multiple databases (I assume, I've never actually used it with anything other than mysql) but it is somewhat hefty on the bad side of 60k. Not a good thing if you're not using some sort of accelerator and have a high traffic site. Here's a class which replicates the PEAR::DB API (the bits that I use anyhoo) and weighs in at a much nicer ~11k. Sweet.   The class is posted for download here as a simple PHP source file with functions and values named similar to those in the PEAR::DB package.
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With the recent acquisition Sun has made (you heard about that, right?), there's tons of resources in the open source community that are talking about it, lots of them are more PHP-specific. Cal Evans has put together a list of some of the PHP bloggers/community memembers that have posted some of their thoughts on the purchase.   With all of the buzz floating around yesterday on this topic, I decided to let some of the dust settle before posting. From everything I've seen, the PHP community is largely positive about the news. [...] As I said, the community at large seems to be pleased with this news. Here are the links I've collected so far.   Names in the list include Andi Gutmans, Lukas Smith and Jaremy Zawodny. There's also a list of some comments from the "pundits" as to what this purchase could mean for the web as a whole.
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Greg Beaver points out today that the sample chapter [pdf] of the "PEAR Installer Manifesto" has been posted by Packt Publishing.   Packt has put up a sample chapter, Chapter 5 "PEAR Channels: releasing to the world" up at http://www.packtpub.com/files/SampleChapter-The-PEAR-Installer-Manifesto.pdf. Check it out to see what you're missing if you don't already own the book.   The chapter he points to talks about setting up a channel (using Chiara_PEAR_Server) and why they're the "killer features in PEAR 1.4.x+".   You can get the full information on the book from its page on the Packt Publishing website and order it directly or from another retailer.
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On his blog today, Stoyan points out a topic he's started over on the OpenSourceCommunity.org site - What do you think makes a good CMS?.   This year's Packt Publishing awards for the best Open Source CMS are on their way, starting middle of July. I've been selected as a judge in the PHP CMS category. [...] How can one judge something as diverse and liquid as a CMS? Content management comes in all different shapes, some systems focus on solving some problems and they do a better job than another CMS that mainly tackles different types of problems.   He shares the experiences he's had with CMS and companies that have rolled their own in the past as well as a small list of things that he's thinking about making "the standard" for the CMSes to be judged by. Also included is a lengthy list of requirements that he sees that need to be included for any decent CMS to move to the next level.
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In this post on the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans takes a look at an article published in a recent php|architect issue from Chris Hartjes about how several recent advancements in the PHP community have helped developers think more in "the Rails way" of development.   Chris does a good job of laying out his points. As with any article of this nature, you are going to agree with some of them and you'll disagree with some of them. However, to get to that point you'll have to consider all of them. That's really the point of the article; making developer sit back and think for a minute. It's well worth the read.   Cal also mentions some of the topics presented in the article including more conceptual ideas like "Convention Over Configuration" and "Rapid Should Mean Rapid".
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Continuing on with his look at his OpenID library and its implementation, Padraic Brady has two new posts with more of the story.   From the first post:   As a follow on from my previous entry about OpenID in the Zend Framework, I've been in brief contact with Dmitry Stogov across a scattering of emails. Dmitry posted his OpenID proposal for the framework over at the Proposals Wiki earlier in the week. [...] It's actually very hard to comment constructively rather than simply handing over my code which probably says a lot more all by itself. [...] Anyway, I've agreed to port my OpenID library to PEAR as a PHP5 package. I checked with the mailing list, and the approach I've taken in splitting the library across a number of freestanding components hasn't seen any objections. On the flipside, it does help by providing upgrades to existing PEAR Encryption packages which are not yet migrated to PHP5 versions.   And from post number two:   Over the weekend, I managed to grab a few hours to dig around my OpenID library with the ultimate development tools: patience and experimentation. [...] What I've refactored towards is a splitting of the OpenID process based on three categories: Request, Redirect, Response.
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In a new post to his blog today, Stuart Herbert continues the theme he started in a previous post about a business case for PHP. In this new entry, he shares some things he's done to further the effort.   To turn this from an idea into reality, I've setup a Google group where anyone who is interested can join in, and help build this resource. Please come along with your ideas and concerns, and let's see what we can achieve together.   He also suggests some "first steps" to get the ball rolling, namely a list of topics the business case needs to cover.
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Greg Beaver talks about a big push that he's making towards PEAR2 by working hard on an integral piece of the puzzle - the Pyrus installer.   I'm churning out code to turn its installer, Pyrus, from vaporware into actual code. Along these lines, there has been significant progress.  The code has been developed on PHP 5.2, but will most likely target PHP 5.3 with the introduction of namespaces.  Pyrus completely revamps the way things are done.   Greg mentions some of the functionality the installer will use including XMLReader/XMLWriter, namespaces and bits of functionality from the Standard PHP Library (SPL). He's released what he's developed so far via a PEAR channel with no other dependencies.
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Chris Shiflett has posted his own recap of the (just passed) php|works conference up in Toronto over on his blog.   I've been traveling non-stop since php|works, so I haven't had a chance to reflect on the conference, what I learned, who I met, and things like that. (Zak has been doing a good job of this lately, and I'd like to follow his lead.) I've probably forgotten more than I remember, but this is my recap.   Included in the things he mentions are:  The people he was able to meet (like Joshua Eichorn and Sebastian Bergmann) The talks he gave ("Truth about XSS" and "Agile PHP Testing") His interview with Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone The PHP 5 Certification and Wez Furlong's "Not PDO" talk
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Ajax Magazine has posted a new interview with Joshua Eichorn, the author of the PEAR HTML_AJAX package about who he is, details on the package, and what's to come.    I have contacted Joshua Eichorn, author of HTML_AJAX for an interview and as promised here is the interview. I asked Joshua about AJAX, HTML_AJAX, his experience, projects, current status,future projects and much more.    The interviewer starts off with general questions - who is he, how did he get started in PHP - that sort of thing. There's a mention of the time that Joshua has worked on phpDocumentor as well as his involvement in a local user group. They move on to the harder questions, talking about "why PEAR?" and what's next for the package's development...
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PÃ¡draic Brady has followed up his last post on PEAR. This time he's covered the method to package and distribute source code using the PEAR installer.  All right then! You read the last blog entry advocating PEAR (or found it during the week ;-)) and you want to know all about packaging code so your users can install your library or application using the PEAR installer. A few things first:  1. You don't need to propose a package to PEAR to do this. 2. You don't need to create a PEAR "channel" although it's very much recommended (another future blog post no doubt). 3. You don't need a whole lot of effort.  Taking your source code, and generating a PEAR package is a relatively simple task.  He covers the process at lengths with easy to follow steps.