Announcements

Stubbles 0.8.0 arrived today and brings a bunch of improvements to the existing functionality, most notably for the XML/XSL view engine: bug fixes, enhanced xsl templates, new multi-project structure, support for a common path for styles, images and Javascript used in several projects as well as the stage assistant which displays useful information when in dev or stage mode. Another important point is a reworked package structure, and the release of several star files as an alternative of having one big file. See ticket #139 for more details.

Furthermore we implemented an LDAP access API (no writes yet - we did not need them ) and a processor that allows an easy creation of RSS feeds within a project. For a comple list see the changelog.

With this release we raise the level from alpha to beta. All of our originally desired features are implemented and nearly all already proved their use in our applications. However we can not recommend a production use at the moment as the XML/XSL view engine still has to prove itself in our applications, and a lot of documentation is still missing, incomplete or outdated due to changes. This is what we will work on before the next major/minor release.

Grab the release from our downloads page.

A few moments ago I released version 0.7.0 of Stubbles. While still being an alpha version, this is most likely the last alpha version before we are going beta. The release was mainly targeted on improving the XML/XSL view engine, and we made quite some steps: we do not need any post interceptor any more when using the XML processor, the complete skin can now be cached as well as that the website cache can be applied onto the generated result. Other noteworthy points are an improved performance of the XML serializer when it comes to an large array of objects of the same instance as well as the replacement of the session resource manager by a new scope within the inversion of control package. Additionally the net::stubbles::util::net package was renamed to net::stubbles::peer as it has not that much to do with utilities itself and there are some plans for more subpackages.

For all changes see the changelog, and download the release from our download page.

This morning I released version 0.6.0 of Stubbles. Main improvement is a new filter API that allows better and simpler creation of filters to retrieve values from the request - and in most usage scenarios one does not have to care about request value error factories any more. See creating filters on how to use the new API.

An important point for those who use the JSON-RPC processor: configuration of services via config/xml/json-rpc-service.xml is no longer supported, you need to migrate to config/json-rpc-service.ini, where the key marks the javascript classname and the value the full qualified classname of the class that contains the web methods.

Another point to note is that Stubbles no longer supports dots as package separator. We switched to Paamayim Nekudotayim already with release 0.5.0 but kept support until now to ease adoption. With this change we should have it simpler migrating to namespaces and PHP 5.3 once it is available.

As always, for a complete list of changes see our changelog.

A last day of a month - time to release a new Stubbles version. The release does not feature that much new features, we focused mainly on infrastructure and code quality improvements. The most important change of course is the change of the package separator. Instead of dots we now use Paamayim Nekudotayim, the double colon, which will be the package separator in PHP5.3 with namespaces. The change will ease our transformation towards namespaces. The dot is still supported, but this support will be removed in 0.6.0.

Code quality improvements come from using CodeSniffer for checking adherence to our coding guidelines which allowed us to reduce violences to zero in the main code. The unit tests are currently not checked, but we will take care of this in the future.
Another improvement is the switch from SimpleTest to PHPUnit as underlying unit test framework for our unit and integration tests. This allows us to get a code coverage for our tests (which is btw. more than 75%) as well as to calculate some metrics about code quality. It should be clearly stated that SimpleTest is neither a bad unit test framework nor that it would not be suited for a project like this. It has its advantages, but due to various reasons we need the figures about the code and it is currently not foreseeable when something like this will be available in SimpleTest.

For a complete list of changes see the changelog.

Some minutes ago I released version 0.4.0 of Stubbles, still being an alpha version. The changelog lists more than half a dozen bc-breaks, where some of them where necessary to fix bugs, some to have better code and others to improve how the code should be used. While there have been only some small feature additions like the net::stubbles::php::string string en-/decoder classes and a SOAP API the main focus of the release was on stability, performance of the Memphis view engine and small feature improvements to ease the use. For a complete list of changes see the changelog and the list of closed tickets for this milestone.

As a side note, I think we have put way too much stuff into this release. We should have done more smaller releases instead. We will try to improve this in the next release cycle.

After three month of work we finally released version 0.3.0 of Stubbles. As all versions before this one is still an alpha version. While we had to introduce three BC breaks we also added a lot of improvements and new features. Some new major features are the completely rewritten Inversion of Control feature which is now based on Google Guice, lots of improvements to the JSON-RPC handling, a first alpha version of the XML/XSL view engine, the possibility to retrieve the return type of a method or function, and an enhancement to the persistence API which is now completely annotation based and does not force to implement a certain interface. Beside this a lot of bug fixes and smaller improvements found their way into this release. For a complete list of BC-breaks, feature enhancements and bug fixes please consult the changelog.

Since we both have been on the Spring Edition of the International PHP Conference this year, Stephan and I decided to continue with the one in November taking place in Frankfurt-Mörfelden. We will give several talks:

• Don't call us, we call you (Stephan and myself), german only


• SOA mit PHP (Stephan), german only


• 6 Design Patterns in 60 Minutes (Stephan), german only - This one could be a lot of fun, Stephan will try to solve 6 different problems named by the audience with the help of design patterns without former preparation.


• Enhanced Stream Wrappers (myself)

Stephan was notified that a workshop he submitted to be held by us both has been approved too, but it does not appear on the website (yet?). We will see what is going to happen with that one.

Additionally Stephan will present a session on the AJAX in action which takes place at the same time on the same place: JSON-RPC-Proxy-Generierung mit PHP (german only).

The Stubbles team is proud to announce the release of Stubbles 0.2.0. This release is another alpha version and contains the basic MVC structure as well as support for JSON-RPC, utility packages for working with datespans, URLs and a cache package. Additionally the build system has been enhanced and a lot of bugs have been fixed. For a complete list of changes see the changelog. The release can be downloaded from our downloads page.

The Stubbles team is proud to announce the release of Stubbles 0.1.0. This release is a first alpha version and contains the basic features of Stubbles like the Extended Reflection API, XML handling with XMLStreamWriter and XMLSerializer, Logging, Event handling, support for filtering and validating user input and session handling. The release additionally contains parts of packages that we announced to be in the next milestone 0.2.0.

Some minutes ago I finished the documentation about the session component of Stubbles. It explains how to use and extend the session classes. Additionally it has some notes about the measures to protect session integrity that are part of the base session implementation. Don't hesitate with comments on how to improve the documentation or the implementation, especially on the part of protection.