Gestern veröffentlichte eZ systems die eZ components. Die unter der laxen New BSD Lizenz stehenden Components bilden eine Sammlung von PHP-Klassen, die die Entwicklung von Webanwendungen beschleunigen und sicherer machen sollen. Hier ein kurzer Auszug aus der Liste verfügbarer Komponenten: Cache, Configuration, Database, Debug, ImageAnalysis, ImageConversion, Mail, PersistentObject, Template, Translation, UserInput

Die Klassen sind weitestgehend voneinander unabhängig und laufen grundsätzlich unter PHP 5.1 (lediglich einige benötigen das kommende PHP 6, weil sie auf dessen Unicode-Unterstützung aufbauen). Über einen cleveren Autoload-Mechanismus spart man sich - nach Initialisierung der Base-Klasse - jegliches include() und es wird nur das in den Speicher geladen, was gerade benötigt wird.

Die Components bilden die Basis des kommenden eZ publish 4. Daran lässt sich der Anspruch ablesen, dass die Components auch für Highend-Anwendungen ausgelegt sein sollen - wenngleich natürlich auch kleinere Projekte von dem einheitlichen Design der Klassen profitieren.

Die Komponenten sind sowohl auf der Webseite von eZ systems zum Download als auch mittels PEAR-Installer verfügbar. Nähere Infos und Tutorials finden sich auf der Produktseite der Components. Ebenso bietet der Artikel eZ components vs PEAR auf ezpublish.de einen Vergleich zwischen den Components und PEAR.

Now, before proceeding further, let's spend a few minutes discussing the objectives of this last tutorial, so you can have an accurate idea of how I'll use this form processing library. Basically, I'll set up an example, in order to demonstrate the functionality of both modules within a real application.

First, I'll use the corresponding classes for constructing an online form, then I'll instruct the application to apply client-side validation on some of the form fields. Finally I'll have the application perform server-side checking on the form data, by displaying the appropriate error messages if any values entered on the form eventually fail to pass the verification process.

They step through its creation, from a bare-bones form, on to adding validation, putting those pieces together, and a look at the overall structure of the form to get a good, whole picture...

Welcome to part two of the series "Sending email with AJAX." In three parts, this series goes through the making of a simple web-based email application. It uses AJAX as the driving technology for fetching the files responsible for sending email from the server, as well as for adding and updating contacts.

Building on the previous part, they create a few more modules - an "email sender", "contact listing", "contact insertion", and a function to get things started - initializeEmailClient. The next part of the series will wrap things up, making the server side of things to actually do the work of sending the emails...

2 weeks after our release candidate, I am very proud that we released eZ components 1.0 today.

As usual, you can download the archives (tar.bz2, zip) from our website or use the PEAR Installer. Beside some bug fixes, we concentrated on documentation in the past two weeks: Each component has now an introductory tutorial in it's online documentation and the API docs have been revised.

He also mentions that Sebastian Bergmann has brought the release into the Gentoo portage tree for easy access...

Join PHP Guru Derick Rethans in this free live webcast on February 17th, 2006 at 1PM EST, and learn about the new eZ components platform recently release by software maker eZ systems, publishers of the popular eZ publish content management system.

In this one-hour event, Derick will introduce the new platform and discuss its design philosophy, its strong points and role in enterprise development, as well as show practical examples of components at work. A Q&A session will follow the main presentation; all members of the audience are invited to take part in the live webcast and ask questions.

You can head over to this page to sign up for this free event...

I enjoyed Friday's pro::PHP podcast interview with Andi Gutmans. With a name like pro::PHP how can I not like it? This was a less formal presentation than the Zend Framework webcast. Perhaps surprisingly informal for Andi, at least at the end. I thought Marcus Whitney did a great job selecting and asking questions. There were some technical difficulties in the live version. I hope those are worked out for the next broadcast, which I am looking forward to.

Now, the question is early February, or late February?

If you're confused about that last question, check out this post for the scoop. (According to a comment made by Andi, though, they're shooting for "mid-February")...