Lorenzo Alberton

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An update on my PEAR packages

PHP, PEAR   ·   01 February 2007 10:18

Abstract: An update about some of the PEAR packages I maintain: [M]DB_QueryTool, Mail_Queue, MDB2, Translation2.

Things are moving...

It's been 2 months since my last post, I think it's time for a brief update. 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!

MDB_QueryTool

The first package to receive some help was MDB_QueryTool: the new official contributor, Elmar Pitschke, added support for custom return classes and made MDB_QueryTool_Result objects more powerful (see the manual for further details). He also started the (nasty) process of quoting the table and field names in the queries, which was one of the most requested features, and he's working on improving the documentation. Thanks Elmar!
The new package release includes even more fixes and additions than the ones mentioned above, see the changelog for the complete list.
I also backported most of the changes to DB_QueryTool, but I expect this to be its last release: the package is now officially deprecated in favour of MDB_QueryTool.

Mail_Queue2

As said in a number of occasions, the Mail_Queue package, while quite popular, suffers from a number of problems that can't be fixed without breaking BC, so its developement is sort of stalled. Benoit Perroud offered his help in developing a new Mail_Queue2 package that should overcome all the shortcomings of the v.1.x release. We've discussed some details and AFAIK he already has a working implementation, so expect some news on this front soon (probably in March).

MDB2

Since Lukas left the MDB2 developement and put me in charge, I kept myself busy fixing a number of bugs in various drivers, improving both the documentation and the testsuite, and personally testing most of the drivers. So I've added Oracle and SQL Server to my existing Firebird + PostgreSQL + MySQL setup. This also allowed me to implement most of the methods in the Reverse Module of each driver. It's still a work in progress, especially wrt the trigger definition handling, which I need to ponder some more.
I'd still love to receive some feedback about the charset handling, and I hereby add a call for maintainers for the querysim, sqlite and fbsql drivers.
Recently a guy named J. Norment offered to write an ODBC driver, let's see if he comes out with something.

Translation2

With the mid-december release and some minor fixes in CVS, I think that Translation2 is finally feature-complete and rock-solid. Yesterday I finally managed to have a chat with Wil Clouser, of the Mozilla Web Team, and he was kind enough to share their experience with me, but before a "stable" 2.0.0 release (which should happen soon) I'm still waiting for some feedback. If you integrated Translation2 in your framework or web site, and want to let me know about your experience with it, please drop me a mail.

Final note

Well, even if my free time is getting close to nil, things are moving along. If you're interested, there's still plenty of room to contribute. You already know how.
PEAR - PHP Extension and Application Repository

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