a programmer's best friend :: Entries from August 2005

I finally released a stable version of patConfiguration 2.0.0. patConfiguration is a package to read and write configuration files in different formats, like XML, WDDX and INI. The most powerful driver is the XML driver, which allows you to write rules how the XML tags should be interpreted. This means, that you can map any XML document to arrays, objects and scalar variables by defining the target types of the tags and their attributes. This makes reading configuration files from XML as easy as just passing the configuration as a PHP variable.

You can download patConfiguration either from our website or use the PEAR installer and get it from our channel-server. Be sure that you have patError installed (which is done automatically, when using the PEAR installer).

While relocating to a new server, we decided to use subversion instead of CVS to manage the source code of all our projects. This lead to some problems, as we had to adjust several of our scripts that automatically generated the API documentation and the nightly builds of our projects.
I just finished the last adjustments and now it's possible to download a ZIP or TAR.GZ file of the current development version of any our projects from snaps.php-tools.net. If you prefer to checkout the projects from our subversion repository, that's possible as well as we are allowing anonymous read access. All you need to do is the following (if you have a subversion client installed):
$ svn checkout http://www.php-tools.net/svn/patTemplate/trunk patTemplateIf you want to checkout patForms or patBBCode instead of patTemplate, just replace the project name. To browse the subversion repository online, you may just enter the same URL in your browser.
For some of our more active projects, we also provide an installation of Trac which brings you a nicer web-svn-viewer (including pretty diffs), a bug-tracker, a roadmap and a wiki for the project. You can access our trac installations at trac.php-tools.net. The project, which is currently the most active is patForms, which you can see using the Trac timeline. We are nearing a first stable release, but this will be the topic of another post.

Today I made the first release of HTTP_Cache on 3rdPEARty.net, the channel server provided by Carsten Lucke. If you are already using HTTP_Cache, please change your installations and register the new channel-server:
$ pear channel-discover 3rdpearty.net
$ pear install 3p/HTTP_Cache
If you are already using HTTP_Cache, make sure to uninstall it beforehand to avoid conflicts:
$ pear uninstall pat/HTTP_Cache3rdPEARty.net is relatively new and will provide packages by several PEAR and PAT developers that are not available in the PEAR repository, more on this subject will probably follow soon by Carsten. I moved HTTP_Cache to this server, so that the PAT server will only provide packages prefixed with pat. Other packages available at 3rdPEARty are Util_Checksum, which is able to generate various checksums as well as a package that provides commonly used exceptions, called P3AR_Exception.

As I'm currently using Java a lot at work (90% of the time), I started porting some of the classes, that I use a lot to Java and make them available to the public under an open source license. Most of the time, you only read of projects ported from Java to PHP, but I think the PHP community offers a lot of projects which currently are not available in Java and a lot of Java developers can learn a lot from PHP.
The first two projects I ported are patConfiguration, which is now named XJConf and Event_Dispatcher (now called EventDispatcher). XJConf allows you to map any XML document to Java objects by defining rules for the mapping process. These rules allow you to call setter-methods and the constructor and define the classes used for the tags and attributes. It also is extendible using XML namespaces, I already implemented basic XInclude support. XJConf is a lot more powerful than the PHP version, but I plan to port the new features back to a PHP5-only version of patConfiguration.
EventDispatcher is a package that helps you build event-centered applications by dispatching the event-objects to the listeners that have been registered for the various objects. The package provides almost the same functionality as the PHP version, which has been developed by Bertrand Mansion and myself.
Documentation for both packages is available at my new website java.schst.net, which also provides a web-SVN viewer, ticketing system, a roadmap and many other features (powered by Trac). Currently there aren't any ready-to-use JAR files, but you can get them from SVN and build them using ant.