Last night I initiated the Call For Votes on XML_Feed_Parser’s inclusion in PEAR. The package isn’t quite where I want it to be, but after several months’ work, the core functionality is all in place and the first round of unit tests are all passed successfully. So if you’re a PEAR developer… please go and vote! (feedback is still welcome from those who aren’t)
We’ve been away for the past week and time on planes and trains allowed me to focus on some simple unit tests for XML_Feed_Parser. I based the tests on the sample feeds provided in each format’s specification and was able to fix numerous bugs that arose during the testing process, with the only one remaining being some problems handling XML entities. The tests also allowed me to do some refactoring, identifying a few methods that could be eliminated or merged into the parent class since they were the same across all feed types. ...
There’s another development version of XML_Feed_Parser up on the dev server. I’ve added support for atom:source and revised atom:author to work with that as per the spec, included the last few parts of core RSS2 support, added full support to the RSS1 module for the syndication and content modules, and partial support for the Dublin Core module. I have yet to see any examples of RSS1 feeds using dc:type, dc:format, dc:identifier, dc:source, dc:language, dc:relation, or dc:coverage. If there’s sufficient demand I’ll add native support for them, but they’re not a critical concern at present. ...
There’s a new version of XML_Feed_Parser up on the development site. 0.1.1devel adds support for enclosures in Atom and RSS2, and for getElementById for RSS1.0. Next on the list are RSS modules, which will allow me to extend enclosures support to RSS1 as well as make the whole thing more flexible.
Yesterday I added basic RSS1 support to XML_Feed_Parser and began the process of preparing a PEPR proposal to have it included in PEAR. I still need to get the various pages about the module in sync, but the code and a rough to-do list are currently available on my test server. My key desire is to add in support for RSS1 modules and RSS2 namespaces so that I can begin to use it to get at richer content than the base RSS1-spec allows. I’ll probably add some mappings for some of the more common extensions and then define a way for users to interact with those that are less common. If anyone has any preferred ways of doing that, feel free to suggest them in the comments. ...
It’s been quite some time since I last wrote about the feed parser I’ve been working on. I actually had a piece prepared a couple of weeks ago, but before I posted it some discussion arose on pear-dev about possible feed parser projects and so I have been waiting to see what became of that. That conversation has died down, so it feels like time for a summary of progress to date. ...
It’s been a while since I wrote anything here, and I’m unlikely to return to regular posting for a while, but there are a few things that deserve some attention. Unfortunately my work schedule and a few more urgent voluntary projects have pulled me away from working on the Atom/RSS parser I wrote about recently, but I have done a little tinkering and hope to return to it before long. The next big change will be pulling each feed type out into its own class to make the package more easily extensible, and at that point I hope to propose it for inclusion in PEAR. ...
Services_Technorati 0.6.3 has just been released. The main change this time around is that the suite of unit tests are now complete for basic queries. I may add more at a later date to test handling of optional parameters, and more will be needed once Attention.XML support comes online, but for now they do their job. Following the completion of the tests I found a few little bugs which are now corrected. They mostly related to the testing of parameters and the building of cache filenames. I also added a patch from Ryan that improves the cache checking. ...
Thanks to the proof-reading assistance of Ryan, this latest version of Services_Technorati should now comply with the PEAR coding standards, so I’ve moved it to alpha status, and upped the version number. Next up will be writing some unit tests for the module. After the fact, I know, but an important step. Getting a CVS or SVN repository up and running is also high up the list. And it’s probably time to return some attention to a project where I’ll be using this module to step-up the real-world testing. ...
A couple of bug reports reminded me that it was time for another release of Services_Technorati. This release fixes a typo and adds some important checks on the return value of $this->_checkOptions() I’m hoping to finish the last few coding standards issues this week so I can move the package up to alpha status. There’s still no word from Technorati about fixes to their attention.XML support, so I’m not inclined to hold up the package’s release based on that. ...