You know you’ve been waiting for it. It’s one of the highlights of your week. It’s the official kickoff of the weekend. Yes, it’s the Framework Roundup! Grab yer hats and hip-waders and let’s dive right in.

Boy, the traffic on the framework mailing list is increasing each week. Now if I could just get each new member to participate in the initiation ritual of going to my blog and clicking on an advertisement, I’d be a happy man! (No really, everybody else is doing it. You want to be cool, don’t you?)

Let’s see what people are talking about this week.

  • Commit to SVN repos was an early topic. It actually started last Friday but since these run Thursday till I-feel-like-writing-them, this topic didn’t get a lot of coverage last week. The gist of the thread is that Mike Naberezny reminded a potential contributor that anyone is welcome and encouraged to submit patches and code for the mailing list. The only requirement is that you have to sign and submit the Contributor License Agreement (PDF… I need an icon for that) before it can be considered for the framework. More information about contributing can be found in the Framework FAQ.
  • Nico Edtinger staked his claim on a Zend_Mail_Class_Thingy in the Zend_Imap thread. It looks like when finished, this class will be the Swiss-Army-Knife of mail reading classes. (Actually, that thread was briefly mentioned in last week’s roundup as it was Nico who gave us last week’s one-liner.) He followed up later in the week with the message Zend_Mail_Read_* preview which goes into copious detail about the class he is building, where you can download it and what it does.
  • Lucene again! A weekly favorite. For those not familiar, Lucene is the search technology that Zend_Search is built on. This week the thread wandered over several important topics including complex queries, fuzzy search queries, and UTF-8 support. UTF-8 support, as it has been pointed out, is necessary for supporting languages other than English. As for the query language, Alexander helped us understand that currently only ’+’ and ’-’ are supported when searching.
  • Lucene also popped up in the Zend Lucene: Index binary compatible with Java Lucene? thread where we find that while Zend_Search_Lucene can currently read any Lucene index. Indexes created with it cannot be read by other Lucene implementations because Zend_Search_Lucene does not support “Skip Data Information”. In a statement that almost made the one-liner of the week Alexander wrote of this problem:

(it’s, in principle, a bug)

  • Authorization and Access Control Lists got a lot of ink this week. The threads Plans For Auth & ACL, AUTH & ACL, Auth and ACL Plugin, Access control all discussed the concepts being considered for the Auth and ACL support in the framework. Since most web sites and serivces require some kind of authorization for use, these conversations will be some of the most important posted on the list. So important that I really don’t want to make light of them here. In a rare note of solemnity I urge you to go out to the threads, understand what they are talking about and voice your opinion on the proposed solutions. (Whew, ok, that’s out of the way…back to the wackiness)
  • An interesting discussion broke out in the thread Zend::isRegistered() regarding the registry and the proper way to check and see if an object exists in it. Long story short, Mike Naberezny posted

I agree. I’ve added Zend::isRegistered() to the SVN.

So say we all.

  • Jim Weir posted an interesting conversation starter on Gaining your feedback on an Ajax extension. Jim proposes (rather completely) a framework component for easing AJAX development. Steven Van Poeck and Davey Shafik both gave good feedback on Jim’s idea and Jim ended the conversation (for now) agreeing that JSON is preferred over XML as the preferred transfer format.
  • Finally, Jason Garber started the discussion Security Precaution. It started as a request for a change in the manual and broke out into a an interesting discussion. The thread bobbed and weaved all over the place but eventually everybody agreed that libraries don’t belong within (not beneath) the document root. The final word (that I bothered to read) seemed to come from Peter Pistorius who explained rather eloquently that:

The only file you need within is the “index.php” file, that you configured your web server to redirect to, and then the js/css/gif/jpg/png files which support your layout.

Everybody shook hands and parted friends.

That’s it for this week. Stay tuned next week for another exciting episode!

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