In the process of catching up with some neglected tasks, I’ve pushed out new releases of both of my PEAR packages.

Services_Technorati receives a version number bump, and little else. The alpha release was never meant to last quite this long given that it’s merely a port of a very stable package, and it’s finally marked beta. My hope is that the beta release will pick up a few more users to put it through its paces.

I had wondered about adding in some extra classes to encapsulate responses, but at the end of the day simplexml does a decent job, is well documented, and doesn’t add any overhead, so I’m happy just returning its objects and letting people work with them.

There are also a couple of bug fixes for the stable release of XML_Feed_Parser, kindly contributed by users. There are still a couple of outstanding tickets, but they’re issues which require more thought so I’m postponing them for 1.0.3 or 1.1.0.

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In an effort to tidy up various older projects that were never quite completed, I’ve turned my attention to my first PEAR module Services_Technorati. It’s a very simple wrapper around the Technorati API, but the PHP4 version never reached a stable release as it depended on some other packages which were also never stabilised.

So it seemed time to make the simple step of converting the code to be PHP5-only and use simplexml for their XML parsing. That removes the dependencies which were slowing me down, and should result in improved speed along the way as the XML parsing is now handled in C rather than PHP. I just released 2.0.0alpha1, but the code should be pretty stable and I’m hoping to run through the steps and get a stable release out very soon.

Update (27th Feb): I’ve just pulled this release and re-released it as 0.7.0. Apparently because the package never release 1.0 in its original version, I should just continue with the previous version numbers despite the change to PHP5.

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I’ve just released the first stable version of my XML_Feed_Parser library through PEAR. I’ve been working on the code for about 18 months now, it’s nearly a year since the first beta, and some time since I last had to make any significant changes, so it seemed like it was time to open it up to a wider audience.

You can get it through the usual channels, either downloading it directly or using the PEAR installer, and PEAR provides a bug tracker should you find any problems or have ideas for enhancements. My time to implement enhancements will be very limited, so I’m also very interested in hearing from anyone who’d like to sign on as a developer to help keep the package moving forwards.

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I just rolled and released a second release candidate of XML_Feed_Parser. Mohanaraj Gopala Krishnan had pointed out to me that the parsing of atom text constructs wasn’t quite as flexible as the RFC allows for and was kind enough to supply an initial patch to improve support.

Since HTML_Safe isn’t stable yet my plan is to put clear security advice in the manual and then if there aren’t any new issues with this release candidate to release it as a stable version. Once HTML_Safe stabilises I’ll revise the manual, work in support for that and release a new version.

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The first release of XML_Feed_Parser in six months is out the door, and it’s the first (and hopefully only) release candidate. I’ve had several people email me with questions about the package in the past few weeks, most of whom are using it successfully and wanted to see a stable release soon, so it seemed time to get moving on that.

This release fixes a few small bugs, mostly related to the packaging rather than to its operation, and I’m now bundling the various Relax NG schemas used for validation to save on HTTP requests. There is one open ticket that I’ll need to attend to, and then all should be ready for 1.0.

I’ve had a few requests for improvements to the package, mainly relating to improved handling of extensions, such as those beginning to appear for atom, but I decided to save those for a later (1.1?) release. If anyone would like to join me as a developer to work on those, I’d definitely welcome more involvement.

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