My how time flies when you are having fun! It seems like a little more than a week ago when we last looked at what’s new in Framework land; and now, here we are again. Get yer walkin’ shoes on and let’s head out on another Framework Roundup!

First, a note. The most important thing (IMHO) that happened this week, the SVN mailing list started working again! (yea!) The easiest way to keep track of the comings and goings in Frameworkland is to just subscribe to it. (send an email to fw-svn-subscribe@lists.zend.com[*] along with 4 box-tops.) Many thanks to the gods that manage the servers at zend.com. I’ve had a project stewing for a while but couldn’t test it till that list was working again. (more on that another day)

Now running a close second to the svn mailing list has to be the release of 0.1.3! (There are those who might suggest that it may be slightly more important, I’ll respectfully disagree) Check the NEWS.TXT or John’s complete announcement for the details that I’m to lazy to even cut and paste here.

I hear the cries now. “Cal, how did they get to this magical milestone?”. The obvious answer? A lot of hard work by all the contributors. (wow, what a Rogue’s Gallery)

• On the mailing list this week there were several hot topics of discussion. I think the biggest topic (by my quickie informal and wholly unscientific survey of glancing at my email box) had to have been [fw-general] Code from existing framework. It’s actually a carryover from a previous conversation. Nico and Rob (with a couple of other contributors) have a rousing discussion about how config settings should be loaded. Lot’s of fodder for buzzword bingo in this one with topics like “namespaces”, “precedence” and my personal favorite “maximum laziness”. Very interesting thread for those of you concerned with how configuration settings will be brought into a system.

• The WebServices: Server & Client thread saw a little more action but quickly dies out amongst all the “point missing”. Andi (tanned, rested and raring to go) Gutmans summed it up really well for everybody.

• Zend_Tree overview got another round of discussion, apparently sparked by me! :) Seriously, Andries, I may have been the only one confused. Don’t take anything but the links too seriously in these roundups. That having been said, Andries overview of the proposed class brings it all into focus for people. A couple of people contributed additional comments along the way and there was a round of back-slapping at a job well done. (well, a job well talked about, but that was the point.) I know we’ll see more on this proposal in the weeks to come.

• Mike Naberzezny (the blank gray square on the contributors list) announced the formation of a documentation mailing list. This list is for those who are interested in contributing to the documentation or one of the growing number of translations.

• Zend_PDF had a lot of activity this past week. Zend_Pdf Bug, TIFF Support for Zend Pdf, Zend_Pdf, German umlauts don’t work, PNG Support Zend_Pdf, Framework change required?. I’m sure I missed some but that’ll give you some good reading. The skinny is, we got German umlauts, TIFF and PNG support committed to SVN. If you are doing PDF stuff with the Framework, you need to check out soon. This is one of the fastest changing areas of the Framework.

• Nico added to his next Zend Mail thingy in SVN. Bug fixed, class movement and some cool new features including, “SSL via 995 supported”, “all errors handled by exceptions”, “delete command added”, “new class for array like handling”. Good job Nico!

• My vote for the most technically abstract discussion goes to Access to models/views in MVC. Seriously high-level discussion on the role of controllers as arbitrators of who can access views. If you love a rousing technical discussion or are having trouble sleeping, this is the discussion you don’t want to miss.

• I’d like to join Stevent Van Poekc and welcoming Stefan Koopmanschap to the Dutch Translation Team. As you know, the team needs 5 members and 3 alternates before they can realize their goal of competing in the Olympics. Until then, we’ll just have to be thankful they are working with us.

• Another discussion sprung up around User Interface Components this week. Andi noted:

We are currently working on this. We already had some early contributions from IBM around Ajax and Forms, but it will take some time until we have something more concrete.

• Zend Framework vs. the no-framework framework is an interesting discussion sparked by one user asking the simple question “Why use a framework?”. The user’s original question arose after reading Rasmus Lerdorf’s article The no-framework PHP MVC framework. Mislav summed up the answer nicely by saying:

...I don’t think he meant to say “hey, we don’t need frameworks!” because we do – otherwise every developer will spend twice as much working on a project recreating its environment that his neighbour has already done.

• This week we saw the number of new proposals drop off. proposal: Zend_Access feedback needed and the informal Zend_ControllerView_Config were the two I noted. The second one sparking quite a conversation on the role of XML configuration files in the framework. Mike made a good point when he said:

While it might not be right for the core distribution, we shouldn’t discourage work like this.

and Andi helped out with:

There are a lot of advantages of being able to open a source file and understanding what happens just by looking at the code.

And that’s it for this week’s round up. I’ll be back next week or whenever the heck I feel like to to talk more shop with you. Until then remember, patch early, patch often.

=C=