PEAR Magazine

Paging Data With PEAR Pager

2007-08-07T12:06:24Z

Zend DevZone have an interesting new tutorial on paging data using PEAR Pager package. In this tutorial, Vikram introduced the different paging features in the Pager package whatever the data is fixed arrays, retrieved from database, or XML files. The last sample shows how to search database with advanced paging options where you can switch pages and set Items per pages for results.

Over the next few pages, I'm going to give you a quick run-down on the PEAR Pager class, together with a few examples of how you can integrate it with various Web applications while still looking calm and collected.

PEAR Blog Official and PEAR Installer 1.6.0

2007-06-09T20:37:20Z

Two great news for the PEAR community, now the PEAR project got an official blog available at blog.pear.php.net. The blog will be used for announcements, sharing ideas with the community, and general information about the PEAR project. The second good news is that PEAR Installer 1.6.0 have been released with some bugfixes and improvements including :

minor improvements to the output of list-all, list, list-upgrades, search. Channel is displayed for many of these commands by default, and with an optional switch for the others
implementation of code coverage reports using xdebug for .phpt-based tests with the pear run-tests command. This is somewhat experimental, and bug reports are expected on this new feature, but problems found will be fixed in 1.6.1

Greg previously announced Pyrus, the next generation of PEAR installer which is currently available in the PEAR2 CVS.

Take More Control of PEAR with Cpanel 11

2007-05-16T19:40:08Z

I upgraded last week to Cpanel 11 which will be available as stable by June 13, and one of the new features that I just noticed is the integration of the PEAR installer. After login to Cpanel11, under the software box choose "PHP PEAR Package" and it will lead you to the PHP PEAR installer. The installer will first check the config automatically and update PEAR channel, then you will get the installer interface as you see it in the screenshot below :

The news with Cpanel11 is that system packages are separated from user packages which will be installed under /home/username/php, this will give users more freedom to search for the package that they are looking for and install it directly from the official PEAR repository, without having to ask the hosting provider to support a package or another. You can find over the hosting magazine 10 steps to upgrade to Cpanel 11 if you can't wait for the stable release.

The Future of PEAR

2007-05-04T13:21:14Z

The PEAR election is over, PEAR Group team, which will be the governing body of the project, now officially include 8 members : Martin Jansen, Arnaud Limbourg, Joshua Eichorn, Christian Weiske, Helgi Thormar, Paul M. Jones, Justin Patrin, and David Coallier. The elected group will be able to decide about the future of the project according to the new constitution. Notice that this is more about the organisations of the group, and who is able to take major decisions, but will not affect a lot the PEAR project as coding or as project itself. From the constitution summary :

The PEAR Group only has power over issues that affect all of PEAR such as coding standards, CVS karma, and all major decisions made about PEAR as a whole. For example, licenses allowed and what defines a collective are two issues that only the PEAR Group can resolve.

Joshua, who is now a member of the group, called for comments to share ideas and would you improve the PEAR project. Hope to see some important changes in the future to make people profit more from the PEAR project and make packages adoption more easy for enterprise.

PEAR Election Started

2007-04-20T14:17:50Z

On the PEAR dev mailing list, Gregory Beaver announced the beginning of the PEAR election from April 20th, until April 30rd 2007. Eligible Voters are PEAR Developers with CVS karma grant. Greg is the only one running for the PEAR president position and 7 candidates will be selected for the PEAR Group. The group elected will have to decide about the future of PEAR from May 1st, 2007 to 2008.

This election is the big one: the PEAR Group will make decisions that affect every single developer, including defining what a collective is, which packages belong to which collectives, assigning CVS karma for developers, and other vitally important tasks.

The candidates, listed at PEAR Election page are :

Pear News Roundup

2007-03-29T15:11:10Z

There are some news this week around PEAR, David Coallier pointed over his blog to new features on PEAR website powered by jQuery JavaSCript library :

http://pear.php.net is now using jQuery for some sections of the administration area in order to view user notes/comments and that I will be starting implementing more sections over the site within the next few weeks (Of course this will all be done once we have split the code completely into templates, views, controllers, MDB2 move, etc)

Joshua Eichorn, author of HTML_AJAX, announced a new mirror of the PEAR channel mainly for installer data at the moment, but there will be more in the future. You can switch to the new mirror and test it by running :

pear config-set preferred_mirror us.pear.php.net

How Should We Run PEAR?

2007-02-24T11:52:24Z

Greg called for an official referendum on the future of PEAR, you can elect how pear should be run. You, mean anyone who is able to login to the pear.php.net website and and must have "pear.dev" karma. I think this is very important for the future of PEAR, and could change the way how the project work in the future and certainly for the benefit of everyone. There is three resolutions, to keep the PEAR group as is, or choose between Greg Beaver's constitution and Anant Narayanan's constitution.

This will change the way how decisions are made, decisions such :

How should PEAR handle coding standards for PHP 5, PHP 6 and beyond?
Who handles acceptance of new packages?
What defines quality, and who enforces QA in PEAR?

Voting for the new structure of PEAR has commenced. If you are a PEAR developer, please register your vote for the future direction of PEAR at http://pear.php.net/election/info.php?election=6&vote=1. The voting will conclude on March 8, 2007.

Print weather reports with PEAR Services_Weather

2007-02-13T20:15:24Z

One of the great pear packages Services_Weather, it offer an easy access to weather services such GlobalWeather from CapeScience, Weather XML from EJSE (US only), a XOAP service from Weather.com and METAR/TAF from NOAA. This is already a great collection !!

I used to print some weather reports in some special periods of the year, and it's one of the annoying task that I was doing before but not anymore ! I decided to implement a weather printing report service and used PEAR Weatherdotcom class to communicate with the webservice more easily. The only problem that the package isn't well documented, but here is how to proceed for weather forecast.

PEAR 1.5.0 Released

2007-01-30T20:21:17Z

Pear pushed a new release 1.5.0 that you can upgrade now using pear upgrade PEAR. The new release come with lots of bugfixes and many exciting new features, but most noticeable changes is that since 1.5.0, PHP 4.3.0 or newer is required for PEAR. From the new features added :

package.xml 2.1 allows PECL zend extensions like xdebug to define themselves as such
automatic enabling and disabling of pecl extensions in php.ini is now supported
post-installation scripts are much more advanced in the CLI frontend
deprecated packages are displayed as such by the installer
TAP output is possible with the run-tests command

Foundations of PEAR Reviewed

2007-01-13T23:55:02Z

Foundations of PEAR: Rapid PHP Development (Foundations)

by Nathan A. Good, Allan Kent

It's great to see the number of PEAR books increasing recently, and this another one to add to your PEAR library. Foundations of PEAR, is the last new book for PEAR, a handy reference and recipe book for PEAR and its package, written by Nathan A. Good and Allan Kent and published by Apress. Certainly PEAR is huge in useful libraries, the same for this book with 610 pages and more than 50 packages. It scared me to finish it in the beginning, but the structure make it easier to read.

Packages covered in Foundations of PEAR are mostly PHP4 compatible, with the exception of PHPUnit2 which is PHP5 only. This is not strange because PHP4 usage remain much higher than PHP5 until today, and that's of course the most popular and useful packages of PEAR.

The book start with an introduction to install PEAR and configure it, but didn't mention go-pear.org which is very useful for a reference book in case for a reason or another the install didn't work. Of course talking about the PEAR installer require a book itself, but you'll find here the most useful information to find a package, install it, upgrade, working with channels. PEAR_Error is in the introduction too so you can get more familiar with errors handling and PEAR.

Broken Go-Pear, Grab it Again

2006-12-03T00:35:52Z

Today I needed to install PEAR again on my machine and was surprised when it failed to install PEAR itself. I have the latest PHP4 installed v4.4.4 if someone can explain me the error message cause I didn't understand it :

Loading zlib: ok
Using local package: PEAR-stable......ok
Using local package: Archive_Tar-stable....ok
Using local package: Console_Getopt-stable....ok
Using local package: XML_RPC-stable....ok
Bootstrapping: PEAR...................(remote) <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DT
D XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

<head>
<title>ViewVC Exception</title>
</head>
<body>
<h3>An Exception Has Occurred</h3>

<h4>Python Traceback</h4>
<p><pre>
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/viewvc-1.1-dev/lib/viewvc.py", line 3623, in main
    request.run_viewvc()
  File "/usr/local/viewvc-1.1-dev/lib/viewvc.py", line 388, in run_viewvc
    self.view_func(self)
  File "/usr/local/viewvc-1.1-dev/lib/viewvc.py", line 2122, in view_checkout
    fp, revision = request.repos.openfile(path, rev)
  File "/usr/local/viewvc-1.1-dev/lib/vclib/bincvs/__init__.py", line 134, in op
enfile
    filename, revision = _parse_co_header(fp)
  File "/usr/local/viewvc-1.1-dev/lib/vclib/bincvs/__init__.py", line 549, in _p
arse_co_header
    raise COMalformedOutput, "Unable to find revision in co output stream"
COMalformedOutput: Unable to find revision in co output stream

</pre></p>
</body>
</html>
ok

The solution was go-pear, without the www. Download the latest version available on server and update then install again. It should work fine, I was just wondering why all other packages installed correctly except the main PEAR package ?

JSON renderer for Text_Highlight

2006-10-31T17:13:21Z

Stoyan Stefanov shared with us his new hack to highlight source code with Text_Highlight rendered in JSON. His class based on HTML renderer, return JSON data instead of HTML. Now you can exchange JSON highlighted code on your AJAX application and display it directly via the JSON renderer for Text_Highlight.

Text_Highlighter is one of my favourite PEAR packages, seems like I'm addicted to highlighting source code. After adding BB code and simple HTML renderers and an ABAP code syntax definition, today I played with adding a JSON renderer. Useful in case you want to get highlighted source code in your new shiny AJAX app.

Advantages of using the PEAR class naming convention

2006-10-29T15:44:58Z

Over the PHP kitchen, an interesting article on the advantages of using the PEAR class naming convention. Certainly there is many good reasons for using PEAR coding standards, Demian find that the most convincing reason to use the file naming convention, which means that a class located in your include path like Foo/Bar/Baz.php is called Foo_Bar_Baz, is the ability to take advantage of PHP 5's __autoload magic method.

What this means is that if you instantiate the above class, and forgot to require it, it can be located and loaded automatically, from any of hundreds of classes in your include path.

PEAR Installer Manifesto from Packt Publishing, by next week!

2006-10-29T15:09:32Z

Greg Beaver announced on his blog that PEAR Installer Manifesto will be available by next week. The book on the PEAR Installer will be released by Packt Publishing, originally started as two chapters in the recently released PEAR Book, and then Packt Publishing decided to make it as a separate book.

PHP Programming with PEAR

2006-10-15T14:42:56Z

PHP Programming with PEAR

by Stephan, Schmidt, Stefanov, Stoyan, Aaron, Wormus

A new book for PHP Programming with PEAR have just been released, written by Stoyan Stefanov, Stephan Schmidt, Aaron Wormus and Carsten Lucke, and published by Packt Publishing. In this book, you will learn how to use a number of the most powerful PEAR packages available to boost your PHP development productivity. By focusing on these packages for key development activities, this book is an in-depth guide to getting the most from these powerful coding resources.

You will become a master of various PEAR packages that help you with the essential tasks of PHP development such as:

Accessing databases with MDB2
Displaying data in a range of formats (HTML, Excel spreadsheet, PDF)
Creating and parsing XML documents
Serializing PHP objects into XML, and unserializing XML documents to PHP objects
Consuming and offering web services
Accessing Web APIs including Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Technorati

You might also check the Book's website for more information and code download