Community News: PEAR Project Looses Valued Contributor - Bertrand Gugger
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The PHP community, specifically the PEAR group has lost a member of their family - Bertrand Gugger (toggg), a valued contributor to the PEAR project.    The PEAR Project has lost a member of its community. Bertrand Gugger (toggg) passed away in the night from June 16th to 17th after suffering a heart attack.   Bertrand was involved in the maintenance of several important PEAR packages, including the Validate package family.    Posted here, here, here and here is more information about his contributions to the PEAR project and personal experiences with him.
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Felix Geisendorfer has a new post today showing off an example of his screencasting abilities. Specifically, the video looks at using vendor branching to keep your CakePHP installation up to date.   So here I go with my very first screencast to be published. The topic is how to use vendor branching with CakePHP which is one of many ways to keep your CakePHP version up to date.   The video is 15(ish) minutes long and covers, from start to finish, the process of grabbing the latest CakePHP build from the subversion repository and install it automatically to your system.   As a plus, Felix also includes links to the software he used to make the screencast for those that are curious.
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P&aacute;draic Brady, looking ahead to the work he will be doing over the next few months, is proposing on his blog about a new Zend Framework component - Zend_Service_Currency.    I did a quick check on what PHP classes are available for the purpose. There's really not a whole lot out there. There's a PEAR class along the lines I need, but it's released under the PHP License and, not to be too argumentative, I prefer non-PEAR solutions where the end-user may have no access to update PEAR.   So since the project is planned to use the Zend Framework, I shot off a mail to the Framework's fw-general mailing list to see if it would be a worthwhile contribution.    He sees that someone else had already opened a proposal for the same idea and decided to join with that group to work up the module. He also links to his original proposal and gives a brief overview of the goals of the package.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Stijn Leenknegt's Blog: [PHP6] function-return-array idea!GeesNotNerds Blog: Free PHP + Ajax chat appStefan Mischook's Blog: Object Oriented PHP Tutorial Updated - Steps 18 - 22Dave Dash's Blog: SymfonyCampWebDigity.com: PHP geotargeting techniquesEtienne Kneuss' Blog: Late Static Bindings ExplainedDevShed: Handling Static Data with PHP 5PHP-Learn-It.com: Cooking Cookies with PHPMichael Kimsal's Blog: PHP PredictionJob Posting: Steinman Recruiting Seeks Senior Developer (Littleton, CO)
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Over on the SecurityFocus website, there's an interview posted with Stefan Esser of the Hardened-PHP Project (as interviewed by Federico Biancuzzi.   Federico Biancuzzi discussed with him how the PHP Security Response Team works, why he resigned from it, what features he plans to add to his own hardening patch, the interaction between Apache and PHP, the upcoming "Month of PHP bugs" initiative, and common mistakes in the design of well-known applications such as WordPress.   Some of the topics discussed include  the Hardened-PHP Project Suhosin the PHP Security Response Team (his role in it and why he left) PHP5's security focus versus PHP4's and more...  Check out the full interview to have all of your questions answered.
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Latest PEAR Releases:Mail_Queue 1.2.1PHP_DocBlockGenerator 1.1.1PHP_FunctionCallTracer 1.0.0File_PDF 0.3.0CodeGen_MySQL_Plugin 0.9.1devCodeGen_MySQL 0.9.1dev
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On the PHP-GTK Community site today, there's a call for speakers that's been issued for the upcoming Forum PHP 2007 happening in Paris (September 21st and 22nd).   They [the organizers of the conference] are looking for French speaking experts, who want to share their know-how and enthusiasm. This two day conference features one technical day, with the most advanced PHP techniques and a business day, with case studies and examples of successful projects..   The theme for the conference focuses on the latest generation of clients and databases in PHP. Those interested in submitting a talk should check out the guidelines the groups given including the deadline and what kinds of "perks" speakers get for presenting.
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Dave Dash has posted his own summary about a recent PHP-related conference that happened in Amersfoort - SymfonyCamp.   He talks about some of the presentations given, the other conference attendees, Fabien Potencier's Symfony 2.0 talk, his own talk on the Zend Search Lucene component and the "clean up" project they spent a day working on.   You can also check out Fabien's overview of the event (with more photos) for a different perspective.
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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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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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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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Greg Beaver has a warning for those developers using an older version of PEAR (1.4.4 and older) and uninstalling packages - a bug that might cause issues from an unauthorized uninstallation.   Recently, a curious bug was opened at pear.php.net for the PEAR package (#9639). In it, a user was able to uninstall the Structures_DataGrid package, even though all of its subpackages were installed, which should have prevented uninstallation.   There's been a key update to the dependency module that keeps this sort of thing from happening, but it's only in versions 1.4.5 and higher. Greg also recommends the reinstall of any packages that you've installed before and up to version 1.4.4 just to ensure that the dependency database is up to date.
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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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Lorenzo Alberton has posted some updates about the PEAR packages that he maintains to his blog today including MDB_QueryTool, Mail_Queue2, MDB2, and Translation2.   Even if lately I've been coding way more in C/C++ than in PHP, I still keep an eye on PEAR developement: I reckon in the last month I've closed a bug a day, on average. And after my last call for help about my PEAR packages, I'm also pleased to announce that someone did indeed offer a hand. I'm happy to welcome not one, but two new developers!   Each of the items has links to their PEAR homepage and a few quick words on where the package stands (including developers involved or wanting to get involved). He also reminds developers out there that they can help out too if they want to jump in and get into PEAR.
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Michael Kimsal has posted some more thoughts on what he calls the "sad state of PHP development" pointing out some of the practices of the PHP group surrounding the development of the language.   Every few months there's a release, whether large or small, which introduces new features and bug fixes. However, with every release also comes fears of tiny, sometimes undocumented, changes that break existing code, and often for no solid reason other than someone with commit access decided they liked the 'new' way better than the old way.   He points out a specific example, get_object_vars and how its return values were changed in an earlier release as well as the update to glob made recently to change its return types.    In his opinion:   No changes should be made to the PHP core without an issue being opened, either in the 'bug' tracker or some other issues tracker.   Be sure to check out the comments for other great opinions on the topic.
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The latest issue of php|architect magaizne has been released today - September 2006.   Highlights in this issue include:  "Is PHP 5 really slower than PHP 4?" by Andi Gutmans and Dmitry Stogov "State of the PEAR" contributed by Aaron Wormus, a walkthrough of the history of PEAR "Know Your Stuff" from Philip Olson, looking at the PHP Manual "Desperately Seeking Susan" by Tom Gidden, a look at the basics of creating a search engine and, of course the Security Corner (Ilia Alshanetsky) is back with part two of the look at configuration in PHP   ...and much more.   You can either pick up this issue by itself (about $4.20 USD) or as a part of a shiny, new subscription (about $35.00 USD).
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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.