Sara Golemon's Blog: Why isn't this in PEAR?
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Sara Golemon describes the path she took in a search for an OpenID library to work with in PHP. The trip took her through both PEAR and PECL with no promising results. Heading off to a Yahoo! search she comes up with one good result - Auth_OpenID.   Now, granted, this is the first OpenID system I've looked at, and I haven't really dug into it in depth, but I've got to say, this is some clean, well written code and the author clearly understands the maths involved (or at least fakes it shockingly good).   Knowing this, she asks "why isn't this in PEAR" if it's so well-structured and useful? It works with any version of PHP from 4 up and is smart enough to adapt itself to whatever the structure of your application might be.   There's also some great comments on the post where it's explained why the library isn't in PEAR, another OpenID package for PHP and suggestions for alternate distribution methods (PEAR channel).
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Joshua Eichorn has released the latest version of his PEAR package, HTML_AJAX - version 0.4.0.     HTML_AJAX 0.4.0 has been released. You can upgrade using the PEAR package manager in the normal ways.   The biggest new feature is the addition of a setInnerHTML method that runs any JavaScript in the string your using to update and elements innerHTML property and the addition of an ordered queue. The ordered queue makes your AJAX requests return to the client in the same order they were sent. One of the biggest area's this comes into play is when creating livesearch implementations or any other time you're making lots of AJAX requests and overwriting the results of the earlier ones with the results of latter ones.     You can get more information on this release from the release notes or the growing documentation over at the HTML_AJAX wiki.
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Latest PEAR Releases:PEAR 1.7.0RC1Net_FTP 1.3.4Validate 0.8.0Log 1.9.12Validate 0.8.1Validate_US 0.5.3HTTP_Session2 0.6.1Log 1.9.13HTML_CSS 1.4.0Testing_Selenium 0.4.1PhpDocumentor 1.4.1Console_CommandLine 0.1.0
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Latest PEAR Releases:HTML_CSS 1.3.0HTML_QuickForm2 0.2.0HTML_QuickForm_DHTMLRulesTableless 0.3.3HTML_QuickForm_Renderer_Tableless 0.6.0HTTP_Request 1.4.2pearweb_index 1.16.11QA_Peardoc_Coverage 1.1.1Text_Spell_Audio 0.1.0Services_urlTea 0.1.0Text_Diff 0.3.1MDB2_Driver_sqlite 1.5.0a1MDB2_Driver_pgsql 1.5.0a1MDB2_Driver_oci8 1.5.0a1MDB2_Driver_mysqli 1.5.0a1MDB2_Driver_mysql 1.5.0a1MDB2_Driver_mssql 1.3.0a1MDB2_Driver_ibase 1.5.0a1MDB2 2.5.0a1
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Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone has posted a new book review of one of Packt Publishing's latest PHP-related offerings - "PHP Programming with PEAR".    For those who have been living under a virtual rock for a while now, PEAR is the "PHP Extension and Application Repository". In a nutshell, it is a collection of classes, it's a framework, and it's a distribution system. Most importantly though, it's an excellent place to find the classes you need so you don't have to re-invent the wheel. (Ok, beginner's time is over, I promise).   PHP Programming with PEAR, written by Stephen Schmidt, Carsten Lucke, Stoyan Stefanov and Aaron Wormus, takes a look at some important PEAR classes and how you can use them.     He mentions what the book covers (which packages) and highlights some of his favorite bits, including the chapter on web services.
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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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Helgi has posted about the updates that have recently been made to the PEAR website (pear.php.net) to help correct some issues and bring in some new features.   I just did a new release of pear.php.net which has a bunch of new features and bug fixes, most of which you can see here.  Some of the updates include:  One column design instead of the 2 column design Usage of the YUI CSS reset + fonts The package list on http://pear.php.net/packages.php doesn't highlight deprecated packages anymore Now developers can see bug reports by unconfirmed accounts The RSS feeds now contain new line breaks! Patch uploading during ticket creation now works   He also specifically mentions some of the feedback he's gotten on certain things (like the new layout, the CSS of the site and the DES passwords) and explains some of the rationale behind their update/use.
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Latest PEAR Releases:Structures_Graph 1.0.3Console_ProgressBar 0.5.0betapearweb 1.2.0RC1Text_Wiki_Creole 0.4.1Text_Wiki_Creole 0.4.0Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_MDB2 0.1.7Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_DBQuery 0.1.7Text_Wiki_Creole 0.4.2pearweb 1.2.1pearweb 1.2.0Auth 1.5.0RC2HTML_Progress2 2.3.0a3XML_XUL 0.8.3pearweb 1.2.2pearweb 1.2.3XML_Query2XML 1.1.0Text_CAPTCHA_Numeral 1.1.0Text_Figlet 1.0.0Log 1.9.10
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The PEAR Blog has posted a request for ideas to help work up a new developer FAQ they can hand out to potential PEAR developers as a "jumpstart" guide to working with the package repository.   New developers need quite a time to familiarize themselves with the rules and conventions in PEAR. With the new role of mentors in PEAR2, they will have a contact person they can ask in that cases. But in many cases the same questions will get asked which will get boring for the mentoring developer, so we need a Mini-FAQ with a list of things the newbie should know.   They're looking for comments posted to the entry to help define this guide. So far, a suggested outline has been proposed by David Coallier for both general information and developer-specific details.
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Latest PEAR Releases:Console_CommandLine 0.2.0PHP_Debug 1.0.0Text_Highlighter 0.7.1Log 1.9.14XML_Query2XML 1.6.0RC1pearweb 1.17.0pearweb_index 1.16.12PEAR 1.7.0RC2Text_Diff 0.3.2Date_Holidays 0.17.2pearweb_index 1.16.13XML_Query2XML 1.6.0pearweb 1.17.1
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In his latest post, Padraic Brady takes a look at PEAR in a verb form - both in how you can use it and what sorts of things it has in store.   over the last few months after finally getting over my ignorance of PEAR beyond it being a hodge podge of packages of dubious quality I've been questioning whether pearifying my future and past code is worthwhile. The answer is a resounding YES.   Unfortunately, there are some barriers for most people to get into the PEAR world (including the lack of the "coolest packages") with some of the perceived barriers including:   PEAR will require large scale changes to my shiny new cool code PEAR only allows proposals for complete functional code PEAR is elitist PEAR is fossilised   He also talks about PEAR packages and dispels one of the most popular myths about the package repository - "you can't use PEAR on a shared host".
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Greg Bever has a (very) quick post about his experiences with the Pixy XSS and SQLI Scanner running against PEAR files.   I tried out the Pixy XSS and SQLI Scanner (http://pixybox.seclab.tuwien.ac.at/pixy/index.php) on a few simple PEAR files.  On the first, I got a java exception, on the second it was unable to resolve the simplest of includes (no ability to resolve include_path). In short, the thing is useless for anything written using PEAR.  Fun!   The Pixy XSS and SQLI Scanner is made to find SQL and XSS injection issues in scripts. It runs as a Java application and scans PHP4 source code to try to find problems. For more information on the scanner or to try it out for yourself, check out the project's homepage for documentation and downloads.
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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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The PEAR group, with some of the new leadership in place, has decided to start something that probably should have been in place long ago - the PEAR blog.   Joshua Eichorn notes:   We will be using it to make announcements and to ask the community for feedback. I think this is a big step towards making PEAR a more transparent project.   So far, the most interesting post is the latest one mentioning PEAR's new installer - Pyrus - a (currently pre-devel) installer that will handle the PHP5+ PEAR packages to come.
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Pierre-Alain Joye has a little reminder posted to his blog today about two posts from planet-debian and Apache that refer to clones/references in PHP4 and PHP5 and some of the misconceptions presented there.   Reading planet-debian and Apache (from Sven and David), I catched two posts about clones and references in php4 and php5. I do not think it is worth to explain again everything here as Sara wrote a very good post already, check it out here.   He mentions his annoyance with articles/posts like these and the impact that it has on PHP as well as the person posting.   I wonder when the OS community in general will be mature enough to stop bitching at each other. And that's valid for PHP developers, gnome-kde and other well established wars.
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Latest PEAR Releases:System_Folders 1.0.0HTML_QuickForm_DHTMLRulesTableless 0.2.3HTML_QuickForm_Renderer_Tableless 0.4.3XML_Query2XML 1.0.0Structures_BibTex 0.3.0Auth 1.4.3Text_Wiki_Creole 0.0.1Image_Tools 0.4.2Services_Pingback 0.2.1File_HtAccess 1.2.0Console_Getopt 1.2.1Testing_Selenium 0.3.0Net_MPD 0.3.0devMP3_IDv2 0.1.1Net_DNSBL 1.2.0beta1
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If you're running CentOS 4 and want to get PHP up and running on your installation, check out this quick and dirty guide posted over on the HowToBoard.com.   The process really only involves six or seven steps to get things up and running, but you'll need to know how to get in and edit things before you can build the packages up right. Oh, and of course, a little credit where credit's due:   Enjoy! Do not forget to install new php-pear as well. Special thanks to Peter Zaitsev.